


A Viper in the Garden

by ahimsabitches



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-09
Updated: 2015-12-13
Packaged: 2018-04-25 15:19:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 18
Words: 33,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4965976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahimsabitches/pseuds/ahimsabitches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story is set around 3 years before the events of MMFR. Immortan Joe finds a new wife in an unlikely place, and she comes with a handful of unlikely surprises. STORY IS COMPLETE.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The People Eater's game

**Author's Note:**

> I'm horrible at tagging, so I'll post any warnings in the notes. I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please comment! I appreciate compliments, but I'm very grateful for constructive criticism. It's how we get better as writers!

“Immortan Joe, I have something to show you! Come this way.” The People Eater calls down from his rattling steel and bone litter, borne by twenty black-browed curled-back thralls. Joe rolls his eyes. More ledgers, no doubt. He hates being here, hates listening to the fat bastard prattle on about numbers and ledgers and cost. But the People Eater invited him himself, and to not play his foolish game would be to risk the Citadel’s guzzoline supply.

He allows himself to be led through the rows and rows of oil tanks, drills, and refinery drums that make up the bulk of Gastown above ground. Joe knows that the people of Gastown, including their blubbering, gurgling leader, live underground. Like worms. Thralls scurry around the tanks, doing whatever it is that Gastown thralls do. He is grateful for his mask. The air is sour and the sun boils down on them through a red-orange haze of smoke. 

There is a crowd ahead, between two rows of oil tanks gathered around a wide, shallow pit. Gastown’s version of Wretched seethe and shout and cheer. A fight, Joe assumes. “I’ve found such a splendid way to cut costs and feed the Wretched that keep knocking my door down,” People Eater shouts, fondling the gold charm speared on his right nipple. “I no longer need your expensive crops, Immortan. See! The winner serves up the loser to the crowd!” The litter parts the Wretched, and Joe gets a clear view of the small battlefield, spots of sand already stained dark with blood. A scrawny, leather-skinned man with a salt-and-pepper beard clad in nothing but a ragged loincloth runs at his opponent, yelling war cries and swinging a crowbar welded to the end of a three-foot length of pipe. Blood and sand cake the right side of his face. He limps heavily on one leg, blood cascading in freshets from a deep gouge in his upper thigh.

Joe’s heavy black eyebrows shoot up when he sees the man’s opponent. It is a young woman, long crowblack hair matted and wild, wearing sand-colored trousers cut off just above the knee and nothing else. She grips another pipe, this one with a homemade pike welded to the end. At the last second, she twists out of the way of the man’s swinging crowbar and would have killed him with a blow to the head, had he not been thrown off balance by his own momentum. She lunges at him, howling, and he scrambles away, swinging low at her legs. She avoids his undisciplined swings like a dancer, swinging her own weapon at his head. 

“Don’t turn his brains to jelly, my dear,” the People Eater yells. “they’re best when they’re unbruised!” He laughs and leans down to Joe. “She’s my champion. She’s killed the last twenty-two men I’ve put her up against. I’m saving her for myself when she finally dies. Look how beautiful she is! Her flesh will be so sweet,” he croons, almost clapping his flabby hands with glee.

The People Eater is not wrong. She is beautiful indeed. She moves gracefully with no hint of imperfection or deformity. Her face, twisted with feral rage, is nonetheless symmetrical. She is swift, sure, strong. 

The image of a man, a son, his strong proud son with crowblack hair, flashes in and out of Joe’s vision in an instant. But it is enough. Enough to decide him.

If this girl lives, she is his.

The girl, bleeding from only one wound on her arm, launches herself at the man and Joe knows the fight is nearing its end. The man is breathing raggedly, choking on sand caught in his beard. He parries her furious blows from his knees, each deflection letting her closer and pushing him further down.

She pauses, chest heaving, lips peeled back from teeth in a savage humorless grin, and the People Eater gurgles a laugh. “Twenty-three, girl, twenty-three!”

The crowd takes up the chant, shuffling closer, closing in on the scrawny man’s deathscene. In one swift motion, she spins the pike and hammers it down on the scrawny man’s face, nearly splitting it in half. The thick, meaty crunch it makes draws a fluttery sigh of satisfaction from the People Eater, who actually does clap this time. 

As if a gate is opened, the crowd bursts forward, falling on the dead man, screaming, kicking, punching, grunting. The girl leaps back to avoid being trampled, arms pinwheeling. She curls her lip in disgust, mirroring Joe’s feelings. Yes, this girl is his. 

“So, Immortan, what do you think of my arrangement? Genius, isn’t it?”

Genius? Risking the loss of a perfect breeder like that? He gives the People Eater a cast iron stare. “Where did you find the girl?”

“My boys stole her and a few others from duneriders in a raid along the mountains last year. She’s the only one of them left. Don’t get any ideas, Immortan. I know your weakness for women. This one’s mine.” The People Eater glares down his piggy iron nose at Joe. 

Joe would set fire to all the oil tanks in Gastown before he’d let that perfect breeder stay in the Eater’s hands. Fuku-damn the guzzoline. He calls his Imperator Boneshake over to him as the People Eater is borne away. “Eyes on the black-haired girl. I want her. We leave in an hour. Make sure she’s in the Gigahorse when we do. Make it quiet. Wound her as little as possible.”

Imperator Boneshake flashes wide white eyes and teeth at Joe, his faceful of carved bone piercings clicking. “Yes, Immortan.”


	2. Out of One Hell...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: mention of violence/rape.
> 
> If you like it, let me know! Kudos/comments are always appreciated. If you find a glaring error or something you think I should know, please share it. Constructive criticism is how we become better writers. Thanks for reading!

The woman who won dabs her finger in the blood on her arm and licks it. She is viper. She is scorpion. She is wasp. She is still alive.

Two of the gurgling man’s strongest thralls escort her back to her cave. They leave her to the guard at the mouth. She sits and scoots under a low-hanging lip of rock down a short, smooth slab to the cave floor, soft with sand. The cave is seven steps from entrance to end. She has to duck for the last three steps because the ceiling dips down. It is a degree or two cooler here than out in the choking, sun-baked smog. This is where the gurgling man allows his champion to live. Wretched pack into caves smaller than this five and six at a time, but there were only two others living here with her. She killed one four days ago and the other five minutes ago. She sinks to her knees at the back of the cave and begins to dig. She unearths a ragged leather canteen of water. It is light. Two swallows. She takes four swallows before a fight; two after. The canteen lasts her two weeks if the gurgling man doesn’t make her fight twice in one day. She used to sleep on top of her buried treasure to prevent the other inhabitants of the cave from stealing it. But now she doesn’t have to.

A grunt at the mouth of the cave. She pauses, her cheeks swollen with the first of her two mouthfuls. The thud of a body. Boots scraping on rock. She swallows. Not the guard’s. People in her cave. Two? Three? They don’t sound or smell familiar.

Before she has time to reach for the knife buried under the canteen, one hand is clamped over her mouth, one hand grabs a fistful of hair at the back of her head. More hands grab her wrists, yank them behind her. She feels rope around them. Tight. Painful. They are fast. The rabbit feet of panic begin to beat a sickeningly familiar tattoo against the front of her skull. She cannot move her head. She mulekicks, finds legs, but the hands on her do not loose their hold. The hand leaves her mouth and a gag of rough oil-sour canvas replaces it. A pair of arms clamp around her torso and drag her toward the mouth of the cave. She pitches herself backward, throwing the person holding her off balance. They fall together, but the arms stay locked. She squeals in frustration, but it comes out a muffled squeak. Another pair of hands hook under her shoulders and drag her, kicking and thrashing, up and out of the cave.

They must have killed the guard. That means if she can get away, she is free. She launches her legs upward, hoping to connect with the head of the person dragging her, misses. Her legs are grabbed and she is lifted into the air, carried like a spit. She twists and heaves, thrashes and screams, but with every step they carry her, hope dims and the coppery scream of panic buzzes louder in hear head. She does not know where they are taking her, does not care. This is the third time she has been stolen, and every place she is taken is worse than the last. She cannot scream or kick or punch. She hates it, hates to be trapped, she has to get out, _get out, GET OUT!_

She is swung upward, lands on her right shoulder on a rough metal surface. Pain spikes down her arm. Doors open and shut. There are people all around her. They fill her ears with their voices. They fill her nose with their unfamiliar leaden scent.

She is slammed against the back of the vehicle as it lurches forward, revving up to a mad earsplitting roar. She screws her eyes shut against the pain in her shoulder, trapped under her; in her back, bruised by the hit. The shuddering vibration of the vehicle rattles her teeth and jars her heart. But the reverberations serve a purpose for which she is grateful: they allow her to hear what the inside of the vehicle looks like. She is on the floor of the backseat. There are three people sitting above her; the three that took her. The ceiling of the vehicle is high. There is more space behind the backseat. The front seat is a bench seat. A fourth person there. The driver.

Then hands grab her and lift her from the floor of the vehicle.

“Immortan, this girl…I think she’s blind!” A male voice calls.

She hears a gravelly, ironsided growl, halfway between man and machine, then a labored, mechanical in-breath from the man in front. “What? Blind?” The voice is deep, grating and rusty, like rocks tumbling down a mountainside, but she hears a muffled, mechanical buzz behind the growl. Whoever speaks is speaking through an amplifying mask.

“Her eyes are all white, like they’s got Mothersmilk spilt on ‘em. And there’s scars.”

“Take her gag off,” the rusty-voiced man says.

The filthy piece of canvas falls away from her face. She does not scream now. She knows it would do no good.

“Were you born blind, girl?” the rusty-voiced man asks. Less a question; more a demand. He commands the other men like a leader. He must have ordered her taken from the gurgling man. Why? What did this wasted, prattling buffoon want with her?

“Answer the question!”

She keeps her mouth shut. Maybe they’d think she is dumb. Throw her out. Kill her. Anything. Anything is better than being stolen out of one hell into another.

Another male voice, from the other side of her: “Maybe she can’t talk, Immortan. Maybe she’s deaf-mute.”

She is thrown forward as the vehicle screams to a halt, then whipped back again when it stops. The rusty voice is in her ear now, close, hot, croaking. She hears a sucking, sick in-breath ripped from the respirator. “If you can talk, talk. If you can’t, nod your head. Or I’ll rip those trousers off, fuck you till you’re raw, then blow a hole in your face. And fuck that too.”

She is tired, tired of being chased, grabbed, stolen, trapped, bent to the wills of murderous idiot men like this one. Part of her wants to let him kill her, but…

Something cold and hard and lethal is jabbed into her face just below her left eye socket.

She wants to live. There is a senseless, ruthless, clawing, gasping will to survive in her. Despite every death urge, there is a little lizard down deep in her brain that whispers she must live, _live, because tomorrow you could be free. You heard his rusty breath. You heard how sick he is. It can’t be that hard to fight him, to kill him. Not an old man like that._

“No,” she says, barely recognizing the rust in her own voice.

“What?”

“I wasn’t born blind.”

The rusty-voiced man grunts. The gun is taken away. The vehicle revs again, momentum yanking her back. They drive for a long time.


	3. ...Into Another

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Immortan Joe arrives at the Citadel with his new wife. She's a little...twitchy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lots of violence in this chapter, so be warned!

Joe steps down from the Gigahorse to cheers and V8 salutes from warboys and pups. The two warboys he’d chosen to take with him to Gastown follow, carting his new wife between them. She squirms, twists, kicks. They have regagged her. It would not do to have his homecoming, even one as common as this, marred by her screams. He signals, and the platform they are on begins to rise, driven by his gearslaves. It pauses at garage level and Boneshake drives the Gigahorse into its bay.

“Imperator, have Corpus Collosus ready a reply and an envoy if necessary when the People Eater finds his champion gone,” Joe calls after him. He salutes V8 in acknowledgement.

The platform continues up one level; Joe steps off and beckons the warboys, who struggle with the jerking, thrashing girl.

_Mediocre,_ he thinks, and holds out his hand. “Take off her gag.” He’d show them how to handle a woman.

Immortan Joe grabs a fistful of her thick black hair and yanks the spitting, squealing girl up close to him, their faces inches from each other. He’d liked her fire before, thought her strength would make him strong sons, but now he wonders if she’s worth the trouble. It surprises him that she’s so unafraid. He feels her kick up between his legs. He chuckles rustily as she yelps in pain. Her bare shin against his steel codpiece must’ve hurt.

“Stop twitching,” he growls, “or I’ll give you something to twitch about.”

She bares her canines, upper and lower, filed to a savage point, and the teeth on either side of them, filed to shorter fangs but just as sharp. Joe makes a mental note to himself not to fuck this one’s face before getting her teeth taken care of.

“Old man,” she spits venomously, “old man, your empty threats don’t scare me. Your strength is failing. I hear it in your rusty breath."

Now Joe understands. The girl is blind. She does not see the terrible figure he cuts: his piercing ice blue eyes, great mane of bone-colored hair, his armor, his fearsome mask; she only hears the labored breaths he sucks from his respirator. To her, he is not Immortan Joe, warlord and god-king. To her, he is an old man with a breathing problem. Fear and anger, a molten alloy that pours white-hot through him, makes his hand twitch at the grip of his Anaconda.

He will make her understand who he really is. He will make her _see._

With the girl’s hair still in his grasp, he lurches forward. Some time in the Organic Mechanic’s chair would chrome her right up.

She does not know where she is. She does not know where the rusty-voiced man is dragging her. She does not understand why she’s here or what he wants from her. So she does the only thing she knows to do: she fights. She kicks; loses her footing and skins her knees and shins. She twists around, tries to bite him; feels her hair rip out in his iron fist. She screams until her throat is slick and coppery with blood. The rusty-voiced man drags her on, walking fast, saying nothing, relenting not an inch. By the time they stop, her body is a mass of pain and she heaves breaths more ragged than his. She hears a door clank open in front of them.

“Aaah, I thought that was a desert banshee,” a rough voice says. She hears a singsong lilt in it. This is a happy man, she understands at once. That, or a mad man.

“It is,” the rusty-voiced man growls, pitching her forward into a room that reeks of stale blood, sour sweat, urine, ozone, and a dozen other odors made unbearable by the humid heat. A lifelong desert-dweller, she’s never experienced a great degree of humidity. But wherever she is now, this horrid sticky hell, chokes her senses and zaps panicked energy back into her. She has to get out, get out, she’s choking, get out, can’t breathe, oh goddess, can’t br—

Wiry arms slick with sweat lock around her middle and hoist her into the air. She screams again, twisting and writhing violently in a wild attempt to get out, _get out GET OUT_!

“Watch her teeth!” the rusty-voiced man bellows. “She’s filed them to points!”

The man holding her laughs. It’s a grating but joyful sound. “Why didn’t I think of that? Come on, little filly, let’s get you--"

Her left heel connects with his small, hard belly. His hot fetid breath washes over her as air leaves his lungs in a whoosh. His arms loosen. She thrashes like a hooked fish, her lungs burning with hot, filthy air, throwing the man holding her off balance. They fall together, him on top of her. She is dimly aware of a burst of pain from her nose.

The rusty-voiced man roars at the edge of her senses. She knows he’s blocking the exit. She feels the dryer, cooler air in that direction, tries to suck in as much as she can. She feels the weight of the man above her, less, she judges, than the rusty-voiced man. She does not feel any arms around her. If she can get out from under him, get enough air into her lungs…

“Little banshee thought she was slick!” the Organic Mechanic hooks a meaty hand into the rope binding her hands behind her back and yanks hard as he stands up, bringing her with him. She faces Joe now, panting raggedly, blood leaking from her right nostril.

“Don’t damage her any more! I want no more blood!” Joe growls, angry at the Mechanic for letting her get the best of him.

“ _She’s_ the one what’s all wiggly,” the Mechanic says as he wrests her deeper into the room, toward a makeshift surgery suite. Joe closes the door behind him.

The girl lets out a keening howl, the sound full of fury and desperation. It hits Joe in the chest like a punch. He’d been born into war, nursed on blood, and grown into a colonel in death’s army. He’d seen and heard the lamentations of thousands of doomed souls, riding to hell on his bullets. But he’d never heard a sound like that, at once hollow and lonely as the empty desert and full of grief and rage and sorrow.

And now he knows her name.

The Mechanic has stripped his new wife naked, strapped her into the flattened chair, and is shining a surgical light full onto her face. Joe steps to the other side of the chair and examines his new wife in detail for the first time. She is young; he guesses around twenty. Her skin is darker than his other wives’, deeply tanned from the desert but free, as far as he can see, from boils, pustules or tumors. Good. Shorter than Splendid and less willowy than Dag, she is sinewy despite malnourishment from fighting in the People Eater’s stupid games. No wonder she nearly unhooked the Mechanic’s grip. He watches as cords of muscle in her arms, shoulders, chest, legs, flex and bunch in her struggles to break free. Joe runs a finger down her taut, flat belly, along the ridge of muscle just above her right hipbone. He imagines the smooth dome of a pregnancy there, and he likes it. He likes it very much. He feels a stirring below his belt. That would have to wait.

His eyes trail up over the swift in-out bellows of her ribs, between her small breasts (no matter; they would swell once he planted his seed in her) to her face again. The lines are clean and symmetrical. Full lips; a nose that hooks down just slightly; high, flat, wide cheekbones, a dimple in her chin. Her body is surprisingly clear of scars, and the few she has he knows for what they are: the People Eater’s folly. What concerns him are the patches of rough, raw-pink skin around her almond-shaped eyes. They reach all the way to her hairline on the right side and run a little bit down her cheek under her right eye. “Mechanic,” Joe rasps, “the scars around her eyes. Are they a deformity? Will they spread?”

The Organic Mechanic peers close, his loose bottom lip shiny with drool. “Don’t think so, boss. Whatever blinded her left those scars as well. See, on her eyelids.” He points to her left eye, where a chunk of the eyebrow and even a swatch of eyelashes are gone. The lid itself is scarred and puckered, giving her gaze a crazed edge. The eyes just below are frantically flitting back and forth. The pupil is the most opaque, white as bone, and darkens to milky grey beyond, interrupted by a ring of grey-blue at the edge of the iris. Joe has never seen such eyes.

“Can you tell what blinded her?” He asks the Mechanic. They lean over her, their heads almost touching, peering closer…

She smells the rancid breath of the man called Mechanic, and she feels the hot, straining presence of the rusty-voiced man. They are close to her face. Inches. Both of them. She knows the rusty-voiced man wears a mask, so she cannot hurt him from here. He’s the one she wants to hurt the most. But Mechanic is fleshy. He is close. She knows exactly where his mouth is. It’s about three inches from her left cheek. Her head is strapped down, but there is about an inch and a half of leeway. If she is still, patient…

“Could be fire, could be acid. Not a blade. Would’ve left dips in her flesh, you know. Maybe lizards. They’ll rip the flesh off your bones in—AAAGGGHH!”

The Organic Mechanic shrieks and throws himself backward, spattering blood in a flecked diagonal across Immortan Joe’s mask and face. He claps his hands over his mouth, which muffles his cries and makes them sound childish. Joe’s new wife spits out a small piece of flesh, grins, licks her bloody lips.

It is sweet, the taste of blood not her own. Though it’s not the rusty-voiced man’s blood, she laps it from her lips, grateful for the chance at payback and the smallest amount of liquid. She is very thirsty. She listens to Mechanic call her a viper, a lizard. Yes, she is, and she hopes they never forget it.

Pain explodes through her skull as the rusty-voiced man’s fist connects with her jaw. Now she tastes her own blood. The blow wakes a piercing whine in her ears that muffles sound and makes everything sound like it’s miles away. The rusty-voiced man bellows something and she wonders briefly what his voice would sound like without the amplifying respirator. She hopes she can find out when she rips it off his face and hears him beg for his life. She feels cold metal slam down over her mouth and nose. Buckled tight under her chin and over her head.

No. Oh no.

The edges of her mind fuzz out into thoughtless, nameless panic. A marquee chases itself across her mind: c _an’t breathe can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t breathe…_

Joe watches her eyes grow wide and wild with panic. The rise and fall of her chest becomes mouse-quick. She strains and thrashes with everything she has against the leather cuffs binding her legs, arms and torso to the table. _Energetic little viper. I’ll cure her of that._

The Mechanic chuckles, dabbing at the divot taken from his bottom lip with a greasy rag. “Looks like your girl doesn’t like to keep her mouth shut.”

“She’ll learn, or I’ll teach her what happens when she doesn’t.”

The Mechanic gives Immortan Joe a meaningful look. “Maybe not, boss. Those teeth...”

“You’re going to file them down.”

_Oh no, NO!_  

Even through the panic of being muzzled, even through the fear of losing her fangs, the mark of her clan, she does not cry or plead, does not want to give them the satisfaction. She’s almost at the end of her endurance. She’s fought since she woke that morning, with no respite, no food, and only a single mouthful of water. The small boost Mechanic’s blood gave her she spent thrashing uselessly. They talk above her. She feels the Mechanic’s hands all over her, his words: “good bone structure”, “no deformities” “fully developed”, “clean blood”, and she begins to understand that these men are not talking about her. They are talking about a thing, an owned item, a piece of chattel.

_No, not again, oh goddess, not again, please no…_

She swallows a sob. No. Tears are expensive, in more ways than one. She can’t afford to waste the moisture, and she can’t, _can’t_ let the men see tears. So she heaves the deepest breath she can through the suffocatingly small holes in the muzzle, and draws herself down, back, into the depths of herself.

It’s a trick her big sister taught her. Her mother had told her of these creatures called krokodyles, who lived in the Before. These were massive, thirty-foot-long lizards with jaws that opened so wide you could stand in them. But you didn’t, because once they snapped shut, they didn’t reopen. They ate people whole. They hunted by lying still for a long, long time. They’d lie so still for so long that people would think they were logs and walk on their backs. But then they’d snap, and they’d snap their jaws so very fast and so very hard that you didn’t even have time to yell and _GULP!_  Down you’d go into a krokodyle throat.

So she and her sister practiced lying still in the desert night. They’d draw themselves back into the backrooms of their minds and wait for prey to come to them. Lying still was hard work, but they got good at it. Their clan seldom went hungry.

And so she pretends she is a krokodyle. She must wait for the right time to attack. She lets Mechanic prod her, even spread her legs and stick a cold metal thing up her. She lets them take the muzzle off, pry her mouth open with a vise that tastes like rust and oil, and one by one, rasp her pointed teeth down to flat nubs. She does cry then, but she can’t help it. It _hurts,_ oh it hurts when Mechanic catches her gum or her lip on the rasp. The roar of pain in her head deepens from the vibrations, and she coughs up blood and powdered bits of her own teeth so forcefully she feels something on her right side, high up in her ribs, snap like a bowstring. Knifing pain blooms up and down her whole side, but she cannot stop coughing. Though there is no muzzle anymore, she feels like she is suffocating, choking on her own blood and teeth.

She is on the verge of blackout when Mechanic unbuckles her head restraint and yanks her head up. “Rinse”, he says, and she feels the rim of something touch her lips. Cool liquid splashes her face. She takes a huge mouthful of water, feeling it overflow down the sides of her neck. She pauses. Listens. The rusty-voiced man is there, on her right. She turns, spits.

“ _VIPER_ ,” he roars, and Mechanic erupts into cackling laughter.

“She did ya a favor, boss! She washed off the blood for ya!”

She is still a krokodyle, so she does not smile. She waits to be hit, but no blows come this time. She swallows, coating her raw throat with as much water as she can. It barely makes it past her mouth. She does not regret spitting at the rusty-voiced man, though. Her whole head pounds. She wonders what they will do to her next.

As if in answer, she feels two pairs of hands on her, unstrapping her, turning her onto her back, strapping her back in. She is still a krokodyle. Lying still. Lying still. Mechanic’s chuckles soften as he walks further back into the room. She feels a bloom of heat from behind her; hears a soft sizzle. Mechanic’s footsteps grow closer again.

“S’good that you’re blind, little filly, or you’d not get any jollies from seein’ this.”

Before she has time to wonder what Mechanic is talking about, her back is lit on fire. She screams, screams as it’s pressed into her, a little sun, burning right at the nape of her neck, lighting up her entire body with searing pain. She screams herself into oblivion.


	4. Identity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joe teaches his new wife a thing or two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW Rape!! If you're sensitive, avoid this chapter!

The climb to consciousness is slow. She feels the blurred edges of pain, growing sharper by the breath, prying their way into her fevered brain. She tries to burrow back down into the black, to sleep, to lie still, lie still, but sleep drips further and further from her. Clamoring pain in her head, throat, jaw, back, arms, legs, nearly overpowers her senses. But before she opens her sightless eyes, she understands that she is no longer in the horrible dank oozy Mechanic room. She is in a cooler place, a sweeter-smelling place, a place humming with quiet and spiced with scents she’s never smelled before but already loves. They are earthy and sweet and kind. She sucks in a lungful hungrily, feeling the pain dulled just a bit.

A voice, craggy and frayed with age and matching the smells, whispers in her right ear. “You’re all right now, dearie. You’re safe with old Miss Giddy. Sit up, if you can, and I’ll give you something to drink.”

She tenses her muscles in preparation to move. They scream at her, shooting fresh bullets of pain up and down her body. She grits her teeth against a groan and relaxes.

The voice again, cooing lull sharpened. “Best get used to the pain, child. Come on. Sit up. You can do it.”

She feels a light, bony hand slip behind her head, just above the place here Mechanic burned her, and, with strength that belies the smallness of it, lifts her head and body up into a sitting position, Her broken rib screams. She reaches out for the bowl, which is nudged into her hands. She brings it to her lips, sucks greedily.

It’s not water.

It’s thick, creamy, sweet-salty. She pauses, nearly chokes, her mouth full.

“It’s Mothersmilk, child, go on. Drink it down. It’ll give you strength.”

She swallows, the burning in her throat coated and cooled by the milk. The person called Miss Giddy takes the bowl when it’s empty. She hears the whisper of bare feet, whispers of voices at the entrance of the room. Two people. Both women. Hushed.

“It’s all right, girls, come in. Meet your new sister.” Miss Giddy says. The women pad into the room, catlike and quiet.

“What’s your name?” Once voice says. Young. High. Breathy and light.

“What did he do to you?” Another voice. Lower, more grounded, sure.

She feels bodies settle on the bed on either side of her. A hand touches a raw place on her cheek where Mechanic’s rasp grated the skin off. She recoils with a hiss, the sudden movement renewing the hammering in her head.  

“Sorry,” the young voice says.

“You’re blind,” the sure voice says. She hears surprise and pity in the voice.

“What’s your name, child?” Miss Giddy.

“Where am I?” she asks, her voice dropping out of her mouth like stones. Her throat burns. Each thud of her heart pulses pain through her jaws and raw teeth.

“You’re in the Vault. In the Citadel.” The sure voice.

“He keeps us locked up here. All three of us. Now you too.” The young voice.

“My name is Splendid Angharad.” The sure voice. “You know Miss Giddy. And the other is The Dag.”

“Did he make you blind?” Dag.

“He couldn’t have. The scars are old.” Miss Giddy.

“Then why would he choose her if she’s blind?” Splendid.

“It’s not a defect. Maybe it was an accident.” Miss Giddy.

“Choose me for what?” She asks, not sure she wants to know the answer.

There is a silence. It screams.

“What’s your name?” Miss Giddy.

Her name is viper. Her name is scorpion. Her name is wasp. Her name is desert. She is the daughter of sand and sun, the sister of wind and storm. But her head feels thick and sludgy, and she can’t focus. She presses her bruised hands against the sides of her hammering head, shakes it slowly back and forth. “Who chose me. And for what.”

Another suffocating silence.

Splendid Angharad speaks softly, but her voice is steady. “He calls himself Immortan Joe. He pumps up water from deep in the earth and claims it all for himself. And because he controls it, he controls all of us. Wretched. War boys. Milking Mothers. Us. He wants heirs. Healthy sons. That’s what we’re for. We’re his full-life wives. And now you too.”

She reaches behind her neck to the burning place, which is covered by a square of cloth. “The rusty-voiced man? He’s called Immortan Joe?”

“Yes.”

She coughs a laugh, feeling her parched lips crack as she smiles. “Immortan. Immortal. He uses that mask to breathe. What a joke.”

“I wouldn’t say that to his face, dearie.” Miss Giddy, dabbing a wet cloth at the scrapes on her face.

She scoffs. “What’s he going to do that he hasn’t already done? What’s he going to take that hasn’t already been taken from me?” She feels gentle hands take hers and place them on a small bulge of warm skin. Angharad’s voice is low, simmering with anger.

“He’ll take your body,” she says. “He’ll bind you to him the instant his seed catches in you.”

The four of them snap their heads up in the direction of a great clanking of steel.

“Miss Giddy!” His rusty roar echoes in a high-ceilinged chamber into which the door to the smaller room she is in opens. “How is she? How is my new wife?”

“Lie back. Pretend you’re still unconscious,” Miss Giddy hisses. “She’s still pretty weak, Joe, she--”

Miss Giddy’s voice stops because she’s left the bed. Every joint is coated with sandpaper. The broken rib stabs her with every breath. Blood roars in her head, but she shuffles past the bed, past Dag and Angharad, out into the echoing main chamber of the room. She cocks her head slightly to let the echoes of the room paint a picture. High ceilings, smooth walls. A stepped pit in the middle. A staircase up to a balcony. Objects lining the edges of the room. A tunnel on the other side. The door there. She smells the good smells again, comforting, cool. They smell like a home she’s never had and never knew she wanted. She breathes in and relishes the rush of energy that washes over her like a wave. His heavy footfalls stop. She shuffles forward, feels the first step down, stands on the edge. Cocks her head the other way and places him in the room. He stands between her and the door, on the other side of the pit. Every hissing gasp he tears from the respirator fills her up with rage.

Clean, Joe sees just how banged up she is, especially the scrapes around her lips and jaw. She brought it upon herself, the stubborn feral.  If she’d only held still. Miss Giddy had washed and brushed her crowdark hair out of her eyes into a knot at the back of her head, leaving the rest to tumble down her back and shoulders in loose waves. She wears a wide band of white muslin around her small chest and a gauzy wrap around her hips. The extra cloth flows down her legs much like the skirting on his own trousers. It looks good on her. What does not look good on her, Joe sees, anger rising, is the thunderhead of black defiance on her face. He’d take care of that.

“Do you know who I am?”

Her cracked lips lift up in a smile. Even with the points filed off her teeth, the grin is savage. “I know who you are. You’re an old man with old lungs,” she sneers.

“I am Immortan Joe. I am your god. I rule you. I own you. You are my wife and you will bear me sons.”

The smile falls off her lips as the truth of it hits her. Her permanent thousand-yard stare enhances the consternation on her face. He watches the muscles of her jaw ripple, watches her chest heave, and feels the fire start deep in his belly. He glances past her at Angharad, Miss Giddy, Dag. They are silent, all eyes. Dag clutches Angharad’s arm nervously. Miss Giddy has seen this several times. Angharad, once, when he brought Dag. Now Dag would see.

Most importantly, his new wife would see.

He strides up to her, grabs her face and cranes it up to his. “And do you know who you are?”

A clawed hand flashes up at his face; he blocks it in his big, meaty palm without effort, closes his fingers around her thin wrist, and begins to squeeze. He watches her delicate throat bobbing as she swallows, the muscles in her jaw clenched. The bones in her wrist grind together under his iron fist. Her face finally breaks apart in pain. The sight of it, the knowledge that he’s almost broken her, that his control over her is nearly total, fires him more. He feels his cock press urgently against his codpiece. The fingers above the wrist he holds curl down into a fist. She takes a deep breath.

“I know who I am,” she says quietly, her face screwing back down in a snarl. “I am viper. I am scorpion. I am wasp. I am anything,” she hisses, her nose almost touching the teeth of his mask, “but yours.”

Immortan Joe roars in frustration, rips the clothes in which Miss Giddy has just dressed her off, grabs her by the freshly-washed hair and slams her, face first, against one of the cool stone walls of the Vault.

“You will learn your place, wife,” he pants, holding her there with one hand while he unbuckles his belt with the other. “You _are_ mine.I am your god. I am he who grabs the sun. Valhalla awaits my command.” His double-pistoled buckle drops, his trousers drop, and his cock points toward her eagerly. “I rule this world. I rule you.” He uses one leg to spread both of hers. He dunks a hand into an urn of water on a shelf near them and coats his cock with the cool, life-giving liquid, blessing it with plentiful seed. “Obey me, and I will be merciful. Defy me, and I charge down upon you with all the armies of Valhalla.”

He charges her with his cock, ramming it home with a grunt. She is dry, unyielding. It hurts him, but he knows it hurts her more. She yelps in pain, which brings another satisfied grunt from him. He winds his hand deeper into her hair, yanking her head, making her back arch painfully. But after that first yelp, she is silent. He thrusts, grunting and panting, digging his hand into the soft, clean flesh of her hip. He feels his come rising, but isn’t done teaching her yet. So he stops thrusting, drags her upper body upward by her hair until her back is pressed against him, presses the teeth of his mask against her ear.

“Your name is Keen the Darkling. Say it.”

“Rot in hell.”

He jerks her head back viciously, exposing her neck to the teeth of his mask. Though the teeth can do no damage, he wants her to feel them. “Say it!”

She bares her own teeth. The words are choked because of how cruelly he’s twisted her neck, but he hears them: “Old man. You’re no god. You’ll die soon. And I’ll dance on your corpse.”

He pounds her hard, anger and lust boiling together in him, filling him with white-hot power, power to subdue, to break her, this feral, this willful, foolish mortal. He is a god, he is Immortan, and he will teach his subjects the consequences of disobedience.

He suddenly remembers the desperate gasps he heard in the Organic Mechanic’s room and the first flash of terror he’d ever seen cross her face when the muzzle clamped down on her mouth. So he closes a hand around her neck. He does not want to actually choke her, so instead of squeezing the front of her throat, where the delicate structure of her windpipe is, he squeezes the sides, where the veins, muscles and arteries are, to cut off the blood supply and make her think she’s choking. He is rewarded immediately when her entire body freezes. He begins thrusting again, bending her forward a bit so he can drive himself deeper. He feels her adam’s apple bobbing frantically under his hands, hears her tortured gasps become the high whine of terror. He thrusts, feels himself getting close. He pulls her upright again. The terror in her bugging, white eyes is just what he wants to see.

“Your name is Keen the Darkling. Say it.”

She can only gape like a landed fish. Her jaw works, her breath keens in her tightened throat. He lets up on her neck.

“Say it,” he rasps.

She thinks she has no air. She mouths the words. Yes. “Louder.”

“Keen the Darkling,” she whispers hoarsely.

“ _Louder_ ,” he bellows, grabs her hips, and slams himself into her.

“My name is Keen the Darkling!” she shouts, loud enough for his other wives to hear.

The orgasm comes, immediate and savage. The intensity of it snaps his back into an arch, rips a roar from him. A conquering god once more, he pulses his holy seed into her, feeling it fill her up, feeling himself deliciously drained. He slumps, panting hoarsely, his fingernails still clawed into his new wife’s—Keen’s—hips. He slips his softening cock out of her, watching a string of mixed blood and come stretch from her to him and break. She remains spreadeagled against the wall, a ragged edge to her pants. Good. He hooks his right hand to her left shoulder, turns her to face him. Her face is stone. Her eyes, blank and empty, are red-rimmed but dry, staring at a place in the middle of his chest.

“Who are you?”

She swallows, her throat so dry he hears it click. “Keen the Darkling,” she croaks.

“And who am I?”

“Immortan Joe.”

He reaches past her, takes an earthen bowl, dips it into the urn he used earlier, fills the bowl and hands it to his newly bred and broken wife. She hesitates a moment, then takes, drinks. Guzzles. Drains it dry. He takes the bowl back. Dips it again, gives it back to her. She finishes the second bowl.

He takes her chin between his thumb and forefinger and lifts her face so that her unfocused, milky eyes gaze into his. His touch can almost be mistaken for tenderness. He drops his voice so that only Keen can hear him, and at this volume it’s no longer a roar, but a deep, guttural purr.

“I am your redeemer. I am your savior. I have brought you out of the desert and delivered you to a place of ever-green and bottomless pools of water. Do as I say, bear me strong sons, and you will never go thirsty again.”

Keen heaves a sigh, and Joe feels the weight of her head in his hand get heavier. The only thing that shows of Immortan Joe’s wicked grin is the crinkling spray of crow’s feet at his pale blue eyes.


	5. Giggles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life settles into a pattern, as much as it can, in the Vault.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is an exposition/fluff chapter! With one important plot point. I really just wanted someone to call Joe a lawnmower.
> 
> Warning: implied/offscreen non-con/rape.

The Immortan and the Darkling spend the next month leaving scars on each other.

The marks she leaves on Joe are physical: patches sewn on his air bag; replacements for the tubes she’s yanked out, dents in his armor, mended trousers, a small deep cut low on his belly when he made the mistake of taking his armor off around her. Worst of all is his left knee. The ungrateful little viper had kicked it out from under him the second time he’d come to breed her, and he’d limped for the next four days. That, more than anything, rankles him. He is Immortan Joe, god-king of the Citadel. To be seen limping is to admit to his wives, his sons, his war boys, his Imperators that he is mortal, he is fallible, he is able to be harmed.

Adding insult to injury, The Organic Mechanic hadn’t been able to tell him if he’d ever heal completely. He keeps the limp at bay through force of will, but some days it’s difficult to take five steps, let alone make his daily rounds through the winding, anthill hallways of his three-towered fortress. He wants to make Angharad rub it gently with soothing poultices. He knows both her touch and the herbs will help, but he cannot show that kind of weakness. Even to his favorite wife. Especially not to his favorite wife.

Keen’s scars, however, are mostly under her skin. What the People-Eater and the others who stole her did not take from her Joe has taken. The only thing she has left to lose is her life, and both of them know Joe will not take that from her. He keeps his fists from swinging for the most part, lest he harm an unborn child that may or may not be in her belly. So she prods him, provokes him, feels for the limit of his patience.

When she crosses that line, which is more and more often, he exploits the few chinks in her armor he knows she has.

He locks her in a completely empty, featureless, silent room for as long as it takes for her to beg for release. The dark does not scare her, but all she has are featureless stone walls to feel and nothing to hear or smell or taste and it drives her mad. She remembers screaming to be let out, clawing the walls until she rips off a fingernail, then muttering to herself just to have something to listen to, then screaming again because talking became too difficult. She remembers standing in the middle of the room, her head thrown back and cords standing out on her neck, but no sound coming out of her wide-open mouth. She remembers feeling a gust of sharp, hot air and hearing Joe’s rumbling growl tell her that she earned her name well, feeling him grab her arm and drag her back to the Vault, feeling her feet leave the floor as he throws her onto a bed, smelling the sourness of his sweat and breath as he fucks her, hearing his ragged grunts and wishing, oh, praying with everything she was that his heart would seize; his lungs would give out, his brain would boil and leak out his ears.

But he continues to live, continues to muzzle her, to cover her mouth and nose with a wet cloth to simulate drowning, continues to make her claw and scrabble frantically at his arms and face, beg him with her streaming eyes to stop, stop, my name is Keen the Darkling, my name is Keen the Darkling.

She knows this is what he wants, but the part of her that’s viper, that’s scorpion, that’s wasp, won’t let her bend to him without a fight. The krokodyle in her wants him to pay, in blood if possible, for her spread legs. Every time.

She knows she brings this upon herself. Dag and Angharad, kind, wise Angharad, tell her so every day. _Just let him do what he wants,_ they say. _The less you fight, the quicker and easier it will be,_ they say.

That may be true, but she doesn’t want it to be easy. Especially not for him.

Immortan Joe would cast Keen out, throw her off the top of the earthen tower, but the image of his heir, his perfect blackhaired son, will not leave his mind, will not let him get rid of her. He curses the man not yet born, curses Keen every time Miss Giddy reports that she’s started her bleeding cycle.

As Joe curses, Keen learns.

She learns that there are plants in the Vault, real growing plants nesting in the sun that streams down from the floor-to-ceiling windows. She learns their names. She learns that there is water here too, water that requires nothing more than the turn of a knob. She learns that Immortan Joe’s wives can drink their fill, wash as often as they like, even splash each other in play. She learns that they eat apples, corn, blueberries, radishes, tomatoes… delicious things with flavors even her grandmother had trouble recalling. She learns that there are books in the Vault, books that she can never read, but that Dag and Angharad and Miss Giddy can. They tell stories of dragons, of the theory of relativity, of wars, of dead languages, of songs, of calculus, of animals, of people walking on the moon, of kings and plagues and wars and genocides and of history repeating itself, spiraling inward toward annihilation. She learns what’s in the minds and hearts of her sister-wives and their caretaker. She learns a semblance of love for them.

She learns that the door to the Vault, made of metal smoother and cleaner than she’d ever encountered, is locked from the outside. She learns every crease and corner, every surface and object of the Vault, in her search for a way out. She learns that outside the Vault, Immortan Joe feeds his half-life warboys and warpups to the ravenous machine of conquest. She learns that they truly believe Joe is a god; that they don’t know what his wives know.  She learns that Joe has a rotating herd of women from which he harvests Mothersmilk. She learns that Joe has three trueborn sons, one presumed dead and two not fit to be his heir. She learns that Joe has been trying to produce an heir for many years. She learns that if she lies quietly at night, she can hear the keening ghosts of broken wives and the strangled cries of Joe’s dead children echoing through the Vault. She learns that Joe, with Miss Giddy’s and Organic Mechanic’s help, monitors their bleeding cycles and comes most often to the Vault when they are at their most fertile. She learns that he may come to the Vault and go as he pleases; that an unspoken bargain exists: a life of extravagant luxury and comfort for total obedience and submission. She learns that Joe is not a stranger to murder attempts by his wives. She learns a deep and abiding hate for him.

 --------

Immortan Joe strides with purpose down the wide, moonlit hallway toward the Vault. It has been almost three weeks since he has seen his wives, and the need for them clangs in his head like a rotten, dying engine.

The setting moon drapes quicksilver light over them, so deeply asleep that they were not stirred when he entered the small common bedroom. Dag, curled into a ball, sheet tucked under her chin. Angharad, on her back, a hand resting on her pregnant belly softly glowing. Keen, sideways on the bed with arms dangling, sheets in knots at her feet. He wants Splendid, wants her straddling him so he can put his hands on her belly and feel the son growing inside her as he comes, but he does not want to waste the chance to quicken Dag or Keen. His seed is high and full tonight. He does not have times like this often now.

Splendid’s lovely bare belly nearly undoes him. He grunts, steps to Dag’s bedside. She lurches awake, eyes wide and fearful, when he presses his big hand onto her shoulder.

“Daddy’s home,” he whispers in a rough purr and grips her upper arm in his meaty fist. He hauls her up the stairs into one of two smaller private rooms in the Vault, furnished only with a small table and a bed big enough for two. The tiny window lets in a bar of moonlight, which falls in a broken diagonal over his youngest wife’s dollish face. He pushes her down on her back, lands heavily on top of her, and is in her with a rasping grunt.

Keen’s milkwhite eyes open the instant the Vault door does. She shuts them, lies still. _Please, goddess, not me._ Joe crosses the room. Murmurs something to Dag. _Thank you, goddess; watch over Dag_. Joe’s heavy boots thump out of the room. She lets out the breath she holds in a whoosh, sits up, hugs her knees to her chest, shivers.

“I was sure he’d pick me,” Angharad whispers, her voice shaky with relief.

“You’re already pregnant,” Keen whispers back. Dag begins to moan and mewl.

“That’s never stopped him before. He loves fucking us when we’re pregnant.”

“Ugh. Every new thing I learn about him makes me hate him more.”

“Welcome to the sisterhood of non-traveling breeders.”

Keen chuckles sadly. The book about the four best friends is Angharad’s favorite. It’s a little boring to Keen, who prefers the story about people who ride dragons and the one about a little girl who steps through a wardrobe door into another world. How brilliant would it be to simply step through a closet door into another world? One with talking lions, satyrs, kings and queens? And snow? And _freedom?_

“Angharad, we have to get out of here.”

“How, Keen?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“I want to get out too, but… there’s no way out. You haven’t seen the door. It’s at least three feet thick. How are we going to open it? Throw pillows at it? We’re hundreds of feet up, so climbing out the windows isn’t an option. Even if we managed to get out of the Vault, we’d have to make it down who knows how many levels of this tower. Full of warboys and machines and who knows what else. If we managed somehow to get down to the bottom, how could we get across the wastes? We’d be on foot. We wouldn’t last a day. Well, you and Dag could. But not me.”

“You could make it, Angharad. You’re the strongest of us.”

The noise Angharad makes could be a scoff, a sob, or a groan. “We have water here, Keen. As much as we want. Food no one else has. Even the air we breathe is filtered; did you know? And the books, Keen. The last books. Electricity. Miss Giddy. We have so much more than anyone has ever had since the world died.”

“And?” Keen spits bitterly.

“That’s not enough for you?” Angharad’s voice is incredulous.

“We are owned, Angharad. All this means nothing if I don’t have control over my own body.”

“I’ve been over it in my head a thousand times, Keen. Joe’s always a step ahead of us.”

“We’ll find a way. If it takes us twenty years, we’ll find a way.”

“In twenty years we’ll be down with the Wretched. If we fail to produce an heir three times, he casts us down. If we turn twenty-eight before then, we’re cast down anyway.”

Puncturing the silence are Joe’s hungry, grating grunts.

A flashbang of anger detonates deep in Keen’s core. It spreads, fills her with vipers, hissing, spitting fire. She clenches her fists, peels her lips back from her teeth in a snarl. “That limp old liar. That piece of wasted trash. He can’t do this to us. We are _humans,_ Angharad. We are not things.” 

Joe’s grunts build to a sustained low roar, then to a final snarling bray.

“That didn’t take long,” says Angharad lightly.

Keen smiles wryly. “I imagine that’s the sound of that huge swimming pig-thing you told me about.”

“A hippopotamus you mean?"

"Mhm. An old fat one with an infection.”

“Dying of it.” Angharad chuckles.

“Slowly.”

They giggle together.

“Hush up, girls; he’ll hear you.” Miss Giddy.

Keen lies back, her hands behind her head. Her moon-colored eyes slip closed, then snap open. A grating snort blasts down from the upstairs room, tapers off. Comes again. Keen groans. _So much for sleeping for the rest of the night._

She hears a soft _flump._ “Our husband, the dying infected hippopotamus. Who snores.” Angharad’s voice is muffled by her pillow. “Poor Dag.”

“I think that sound is more like a rusty machine. A useless one. Miss Giddy, what's that machine called, the one that used to shear the earth in the Before? The one in the story you told us that cut off the tip your toe? Toecutter? No, that's not right. Grasscutter?”

“Lawnmower.”

“Our husband, the dying infected lawnmower.” Angharad.

 This time, Miss Giddy giggles too.


	6. Snake Charmer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joe tries to add another title to his resume.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Mention of non-con/rape/violence. No actual violence. 
> 
> **None of the songs in this chapter are mine!!**  
> Songs used, in order of appearance:  
> "Little Bird" by Jewel  
> "Hope in the Air" by Laura Marling  
> "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin
> 
> If you have not listened to Laura Marling, I HIGHLY recommend her. She is an eternal soul in a young body, and her music is ethereal, uplifting, damning, frightening, and amazingly beautiful.

This morning is a good morning. Joe seldom visits them when they’re on their blood, which both Dag and Keen are now. Miss Giddy is up, puttering around the Vault, tidying stacks of books and humming snatches of songs sung before the world shattered. Keen lies awake, sightless eyes gazing up at the ceiling, listening to the soft breaths of her sister-wives on her right. Though she can never completely relax, she is grateful for the rest. It has been almost two months now, and so far she has not caught child from Joe. She clings to the hope that she is barren. She places her hands on her belly. The valley between the peaks of her hips is filled in, but not from a child. She has eaten and drunk more in the last three months than it feels she’s done in her whole life. The hollows in the rest of her have filled in for the most part, but not with much fat. She is viper, after all, she is scorpion, she is wasp, and she must stay sharp. So when she is not filling her mind with wordburgers, she is honing her body. She moves through the fighting motions her mother and big sister taught her, lifts and carries ever-larger stacks of books, finds a high ledge and pulls herself up, once the first day, twice the second, thrice the third, until she loses count and pulls up until her muscles fail.

A smile touches the corner of her lips as she remembers something Dag said to her: “If you exercise any more, you’ll become more of a man than Joe.”

Wouldn’t _that_ be a reckoning.

She hears Angharad stirring. She’s gotten to know her sister-wives well, by the sound of their steps, by the rustle of their clothes. Angharad lets out a little moan. She’s almost six months along now, and her baby kicks lustily. Quiet and catlike, she pads to Angharad’s bed and slips under the covers with her.

“Did I wake you up?” she whispers.

“I was awake already.”

“The baby wouldn’t let me sleep. She keeps kicking my stomach.”

“I could sing to her if you want.”

“I didn’t know you could sing.”

“Well, I… haven’t tried in a long time. My parents taught my big sister and me. They had beautiful voices. They sang together and the whole clan listened. I’m not as good as they were.”

“I don’t care what you sound like, as long as you get her to stop kicking me,” Angharad chuckles.

Keen scoots close, holds an ear to Angharad’s big round belly. “Hush, little girl; be still.” There is a lullaby her mother sung to her. She takes a breath, sets her voice to the key.

 _There’s a little bird somebody sent_  
_Down to the earth to live on the wind_  
_Blowing on the wind, she sleeps on the wind_  
_This little bird somebody sent._  
  
_Light and fragile, she’s feathered sky-blue_  
_Thin and graceful, the sun shining through_  
_She flies so high, up in the sky_  
_Way out of reach of human eyes._  
  
_Light and fragile and feathered sky-blue_  
_Thin and graceful, the sun shines through_  
  
_And the only time that she touches ground_  
_Is when that little bird, little bird_  
_Is when that little bird, little bird_  
_Is when that little bird dies._

Keen is so deep in the fading memory of her mother’s face that she does not hear the mechanical in-and-out breaths in the doorway until Angharad squeezes her arm.

“You’re a very naughty girl, Keen, hiding your gifts from me.” Joe’s voice is low and rumbling. Keen can’t tell if it’s anger or exhaustion or something else.

“Not a lot I can hide from you, old man; you know every inch of me now.” She puts on an especially contemptuous sneer to test him.

“Except what’s under that pretty darkling hair. Sing another song.”

She blinks. She expected to get yanked out of Angharad’s bed and forced into one of the private ones, but he didn’t even threaten her. _Damn my eyes_. _I can throw an apple and hit his head from twenty feet, but I can’t read the old smeg's face._           

“Another song, or I’ll fuck your face until you choke.”

Keen snorts, relieved to be in familiar territory now. “You wouldn’t waste what little seed you have left, old man.”

Dag is awake now; she hears sheets rustling.

“A song. Or ten days of solitary confinement. Your choice.”

 _Goddess curse him._ She dips into her deep memory and surfaces with the story of the daughter of a god who let his world turn to ashes.

 _No hope in the air,_  
_no hope in the water,_  
_not even for me,_  
_your last serving daughter._  
  
_Why fear death? Be scared of living._  
_Our hearts are small and ever thinning._  
_There is no hope ever of winning,_  
_oh, why fear death? Be scared of living._  
  
_I have seen men provoked,_  
_and I have seen lives revoked,_  
_and I looked at my life and choked._  
_From there no more ever I spoke._  
  
_I can't give up that quick._  
_My life is a candle and a wick._  
_You can put it out but you can't break it down._  
_In the end we are waiting to be lit._  
  
_There's hope in the air,_  
_there's hope in the water,_  
_but sadly not me,_  
_your last serving daughter._  
  
_A friend is a friend forever,_  
_and a good one will never leave, never._  
_But you've never been south of what rolls off your mouth,_  
_you will never understand, ever._  
  
_You speak minds handed down to you,_  
_by the lies handed down by your truth,_  
_and your angels that dance at your will,_  
_will mask your scrambling youth._  
  
_I forgave you your shortcomings,_  
_and ignored your childish behavior._  
_Laid a kiss on your head,_  
_and before I left, said, "stay away from fleeting failure"._  
  
_There's hope in the air,_  
_there's hope in the water,_  
_but sadly not me,_  
_your last serving daughter._  
  
_Pick up your rope, lord, sling it to me,_  
_if we are to battle I must not be weak._  
_And give us your strength lord, and your food and your water,_  
_oh, I am your savior, your last serving daughter._  
  
_There's hope in the air,_  
_there's hope in the water,_  
_but sadly not me,_  
_your last serving daughter._  
  
_There's hope in the air,_  
_there's hope in the water,_  
_But no hope for me,_  
_your last serving daughter._            

No one speaks for a long time. The baby in Angharad’s belly is still. The only sound in the room is Immortan Joe’s hissing breath.

“Splendid. To me,” Joe grunts.

The rustle of sheets, dip and rise of the bed, whisper of bare feet on stone, receding thumps of heavier boots. For a moment, the women left in the common bedroom are silent.

“Did I make him happy or piss him off?” Keen asks.

Miss Giddy and Dag in unison: “I don’t know.”     

 

* * *

         

Immortan Joe gingerly, creakily eases himself into his chair as his attendants approach, reverently saluting V8, and begin to unarmor him. He heaves a sigh, which becomes a soft groan of pain, then a cough. His Keen-kicked knee is killing him. His back too. The fresh scratches she’s left on his cheeks sting. His fingers come away smeared with deep red blood.

_Gods do not bleed._

The nine days until she’s fertile she’ll now spend in solitary confinement should help that little lesson sink in.

_Gods do not bleed.  Ungrateful viper._

“Maybe you should change strategy, Dad,” Corpus burbles from his chair beside his father’s. “If you want the Darkling to be soft to you, be soft to her first.”

Joe favors his eldest son with a molten glare. “Softness is weakness, my boy. I am neither.”

Corpus is diplomatically silent.

“Keen is not like my other wives. They are pliant and docile. They understand what I’ve done for them is proof of my mercy. They understand what I’ve given them is far more than anyone else has. Even me. They do not even know what disobedience is. When I show them love, they are grateful. They know it to be the favor of a god. Keen does not understand this yet. Until she does, I must show her the wrath of a god.”

He feels better as the weight of his armor falls away, despite the discomfort of having his skin and body bared to prying eyes. But the only eyes in this room are his son’s and his attendants’. He trusts Corpus and requires his attendants to live apart from the rest of the Citadel, so his godly image is not at risk. He takes a last deep breath of filtered air before his filter-bag is turned off and removed. He peels the mask from this face and coughs. It is a ragged, soupy sound.

“If you keep trying the same thing over and over again and it doesn’t work, maybe try something else. That’s all I meant, Dad.”

A warpup with blackened forehead approaches him, head bowed, with a bowl in his hands. The bowl is filled with a fragrant brownish-green sludge. Joe grits his teeth against a groan of pain as he straightens his bad knee. He prefers poultice to Organic Mechanic’s joint shots; they hurt like a fuk-ushimaing bastard going in and his joints hurt worse after they wear off. The warpup kneels beside his knee, scoops a small palmful of poultice from the bowl and places his hand reverently on Joe’s knee, working the healing herbs in with slow circular motions.

Maybe Corpus has a point.

The bubble of a thought surfaces in his mind and immediately pops. No, she would not do as an Imperator. Though her spitfire temper and grit remind him uncannily of Furiosa, his newest Imperator has two things his newest wife does not: enough sense to know her place and enough wisdom to keep her mouth shut. Such a pretty mouth as Keen’s should be open, he admits, but not for the reasons she keeps it so.

Two attendants appear on all fours in front of him, bowls of water beside them. They each take one of his feet and begin washing it gently, reverently. He lets his mind idle on the thought of Keen on her knees in front of him, her mouth full of his cock.

A gear engages. Like the muzzle, like solitary confinement, he has been using his cock as a punishment for Keen; as a weapon to beat her into submission. His other wives understand that copulation with the Immortan is a holy act, not only their duty but their privilege. They love his shining seed inside of them, and he loves seeing it there, mixed with the salty-spicy slickness of their own come.

Another gear. No wonder Keen hasn’t quickened yet. He hasn’t made her come, ever. Joe knows that a woman’s orgasm makes her most receptive, most fertile. But so far, the only way to get at Keen is to hold her arms down and pin her legs. Joe could no sooner get his face close to Keen’s clit without her kicking it in than he could mold his perfect heir out of dust and breath. He’d have to soften her first. Make her grateful to him. Beholden to him. What could he do make her understand the favor of a god?

High gear now. He snaps his fingers. A warboy attendant appears at his side. “Tell Coma The Immortan requires a guitar. Not the one he uses on the Doof Wagon. The Gibson acoustic.”

When he was still Colonel Joe Moore, when the cataclysmic ignorance of mortal men had not yet killed the world, he’d played a guitar. His fingers, unused to the work he asked of them, are blistered after only minutes of picking, tuning, strumming, shaking the rust off. If this chromes Keen up, it’d be worth it. He grips the battered, shabby guitar by its neck and enters the Vault. Angharad’s voice trails off. His wives are puddled into a sun-drenched corner of the Vault, surrounded by books and seated on a pile of pillows. A book is open in Angharad’s lap. Dag leans against her shoulder. Keen is on her back, her head resting on Angharad’s leg. They scramble to stand, Dag lending pregnant Angharad her hand. Miss Giddy materializes from the dimness of the common bedroom.

Knowing he has every fiber of their attention, he grabs a rusty folding chair on his way across the room, drags it, lifts it, places it, sits. Settles the guitar on his knee.

The three women with working eyes have them locked on the instrument snugged in Joe’s lap. Keen wears her customary wary scowl. He’d fix that.

“Keen.”

She bares her teeth. Feral. He’s had wardogs that behaved better.

“Keen. _To me._ ”

Dag nudges her with her shoulder. She steps forward.

“Put your teeth back where they belong, viper. Or I won’t give you your gift.”

“Gift,” she spits. “Pretty sure you and I have different definitions of _that_ word.”

In answer, he starts strumming the opening measures to a song he knows well. Not his favorite, but easy to play and soothing to hear.  The contemptuous snarl drops off her face as if she’s been slapped. She leans forward, cocks her head first one way, then the other, perhaps wondering if what she’s hearing is real. Her expression softens from pure shock to confusion to…is that longing? Joe grins under his mask. King. Redeemer. God. Snake-charmer.

 _There's a feeling I get when I look to the west,_  
_And my spirit is crying for leaving._  
_In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees,_  
_And the voices of those who stand looking._

Joe blinks, surprised despite himself. The song was old when he was young. How does a half-feral girl born two decades after the world fell know it?

 _And it's whispered that soon, if we all call the tune,_  
_Then the piper will lead us to reason._  
_And a new day will dawn for those who stand long,_  
_And the forests will echo with laughter._

Her voice, pure and sweet and smoky, echoes in Joe’s hollow places, slowing his blood, cooling his mind, easing the gnawing ache in his bones. Keen smiles through the notes. There is no venom in this grin. It smooths her face and lifts her entire being. It is a beautiful sight. He has charmed the snake indeed.            

 _Your head is humming and it won't go, in case you don't know,_  
_The piper's calling you to join him,_  
_Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know_  
_Your stairway lies on the whispering wind?_

Joe picks up the song for the last verse. The twining of her honeyed contralto and his resonant bass creates a harmony that floats his mind from its moorings, drifts it out across the notes, out of time.

He is not a sentimental man, or one that keeps memories to visit in the middle of the night. When the world burned, it burned Colonel Joe Moore with it. Immortan Joe, a god among savages, rose from his bones to straddle the world and carry it into the future. His future. There are weathered relics of Colonel Moore’s life poking through to his consciousness like the nubs of rotten pilings just visible above incoming waves, but they are few and far between. This song is one, and others come rushing in on the high tide of Keen’s voice: comfortable chairs by fireplaces; full bellies and laughing friends; the last ghosted wisps of peace in a world about to tip headlong into chaos.

 _And as we wind on down the road_  
_Our shadows taller than our soul._  
_There walks a lady we all know_  
_Who shines white light and wants to show_  
_How everything still turns to gold._  
_And if you listen very hard_  
_The tune will come to you at last._  
_When all are one and one is all_  
_To be a rock and not to roll._

Joe drops his hands and his voice. She finishes the song alone, the last note of it hanging in the air between them, pure even as it dies.

_And she's buying a stairway to heaven._

Keen’s eyes are closed dreamily. She’s as adrift on the music as Joe was. Tears leak down Miss Giddy’s wrinkled, written cheek. Angharad and Dag are two pairs of dinner-plate eyes.

“My mother used to sing that to us when we were children,” Keen breathes. “She said the lady in the song is the soul of the Old World before it turned sour.” She opens her eyes and the gentle smile, innocent of savagery or anger, widens. Joe sees his crowhaired wife with her guard down for the first time.

Mission accomplished.

“The instrument is yours,” he says, “as well as the piano in the scrapyard. I’ll have it repaired and brought up.”

Keen’s face closes, her brow furrowing. “What’s the catch? What do you want?”

“A song every now and then,” he purrs as placatingly as he can.

The viper’s teeth return. “You don’t give gifts. This isn’t charity; it’s extortion.”

 _Well look who found the wordburger book._ Joe’s own lips peel back in a snarl behind his mask as he feels his victory slip. _Fuku-damn you, ungrateful viper._ He rises from the chair, places the guitar in Keen’s hands and leans in toward her, his mechanical rumble roughening to a growl as the teeth of his mask brush her ear. “I stretched out my hand and offered you mercy on top of mercy. Continue to spit on my gifts and you _will_ regret it.” To Miss Giddy he calls as he pulls the Vault door shut: “Find all the sheet music you can. Teach my wives to sing and play.”


	7. New Game

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things get weird for Keen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: non-con/rape in this chapter!

It is darker than usual inside Keen’s head tonight because she knows Joe will come to her. She has just ended the twelfth day of her cycle, and the next three days are when her body is ripest for Joe’s seed. In the one hundred and seventy-three days she’s been locked in the Vault with Dag, Keen’s cycle has fallen in and out of sync with hers. Now it’s about five days off. At least Dag is safe from him tonight.

_Goddess, brittle his bones and sap his strength,_ Keen prays, as she prays every night he comes to her. _Lend me your might to remind him who I am. I am viper, I am scorpion, I am wasp, I am born in your image, of your strength._

“He’ll be here soon, child.” Miss Giddy in the doorway of the bedroom. Keen steps down from her bed and follows Miss Giddy out into the common room. Dag’s hand squeezes hers as the Vault door rattles and clunks open.

Keen breathes deep, preparing for the fight.

Joe breathes deep, preparing for the fight, as he turns the great lock of the Vault door. He will make her come tonight, which will take both force and finesse. How much of each will be up to her. The shot Organic Mechanic gave him is working well; he could go two, perhaps three rounds with her if that’s what it would take.

“Miss Giddy,” he intones ceremonially, drinking in the sight of his wives, his treasures, before him, “is my Darkling in readiness?”

“She is,” Miss Giddy replies, and ushers Keen forward.

Freshly scrubbed and dressed, Keen would be beautiful if not for the defiance coiled like striking snakes in every line of her body. Months of eating well have cultivated a healthy growth of muscle on his newest wife’s frame. She is lean and compact, less bulky than a warboy but not by much. The dingy yellow light thrown by the lamps puts the tone of her shoulders, arms, chest, stomach and legs in clear relief. What holds Joe’s interest most is the slight ripple on her stomach and the V of muscle bunched just above her hip and ending beneath the wrap around her hips. It’s not supposed to look like that. It’s supposed to be smooth and round and big, full of his child. His cock throbs. Yes, he’d fix that. Tonight. “Come, wife,” he says, reaching for her hand.

She snaps it out of his grasp with a hiss. “Drag me or carry me, old man. Let’s see how powerful the Immortan is tonight.” Derision drips from her voice like venom.

Knowing every joint in his body will scream at him tomorrow, he grabs Keen around the waist and tosses her over his shoulder like a sack of spare parts. Her yelp of surprise brings a smile to his craggy face under the mask. It fades halfway up the stairs when his back begins to twinge and Keen’s fight kicks in. Her thrashing nearly overbalances him and would have sent both of them tumbling back down the stairs, but he plants his foot and saves them at the expense of his bad knee, which pops in a burst of pain.

"Viper,” he growls and throws her into the bed, begetting another twinge in his back. She stays where she’s put. A good sign, teeth bared or not. This is a game, Joe has come to understand over the months. Joe is a foot and a half taller, ten stone heavier, flexes bigger muscles, and has been brawling since before her mother was born. They both know she cannot best him physically despite his age and failing health. But whatever lights the spitfire in Keen won’t let her submit to him without a fight. It is, he’s come to understand, her nature to be a contrary, ungrateful, selfish feral with more fight than sense. What a burden it is to be so full of mercy in the face of such ignorance.

And so he takes the first risk: he strips completely naked. And he feels it; his chestplate and mask had saved him from plenty of scratches and bruises. She cocks her head when she hears the mask come off. Her useless, milked-over eyes never look directly at his face, but often they pierce his mind.

“Must be feeling strong indeed, old man, coming to me armorless. Or are you finally ready to admit that the only way you can get it up without a shot from Mechanic is to get beaten up by women half your size?”

The jibes used to rankle him. Now they don’t. Just another part of her game. He sits on the edge of the bed, his cock standing stiffly up from his lap. “Disrobe,” he commands.

Her clawed hand lashes out at his face, lighting quick. His grasp is quicker.

“Make me,” she spits.

“Be a good girl. Daddy has a surprise for you,” he purrs, letting go of her wrist. Finesse may fail, but if he’s lucky, it will throw her off her guard long enough for him to do what he needs to do.

The briefest flash of hesitancy crosses her face before she scoffs. “If it’s the shriveled pustule-ridden worm between your legs, I know all about that.”

“Actually, my Darkling, it’s not.”

Keen blinks, suspicion simmering. His voice, stripped of the mechanical amplification of the mask, rumbles languidly in his chest. It reminds her of the day they sang together. For those precious few minutes, his presence hadn’t been predatory. But now she feels it radiating from him like heat from a fire: thick, slavering, _hungry_.

“What do you want, old man?”

“You, on your back, naked.”

Keen’s suspicion deepens. “This is a trick.”

Joe knows he can say nothing to allay her doubt, so he places the flat of his hand between her breasts and pushes. She resists.

“Tell me what you’re going to do to me.” The words are low and icy and lethal.

Far from being intimidated, Joe smiles. He’s finessed his way into a gap in her defenses. All it needs now is the truth to crack it open, and she will be his.

Keen feels Joe’s hands land on either side of her and his hot breath gust in her ear. “I’m going to eat your pussy until you scream, and then I’m going to put my strong son in your belly.”

Bewilderment slaps her into silence. _What?_

This time she yields to Joe’s hand on her chest. Though she is taut as a bowstring, Joe knows she will not resist him anymore. He pulls off the sleeveless wrap around her breasts, gives them a quick fondle, then pulls off the gauzy robe around her waist. His wives keep the hair between their legs trimmed for him, and Keen’s is an inverted triangle, inky black like the thick waves that frame her face. He spreads her legs, bends her knees, rests his weight on her feet to keep them from kicking, hooks his hands around the crease between hip and thigh, and lets his tongue follow the direction her little triangle so kindly points out. 

A cold arrow of shock zips through Keen, freezing her muscles and stopping her breath. A thousand different sensations flood her brain: confusion, disgust, fear…curiosity. No man has ever done what he is doing now.

Joe could get drunk on the tangy-sweet taste of her. He savors the taste, the velvety warm softness of all his wives, but there is something about the first time with a new wife that he relishes. He loves feeling them writhe under his hands, pinioned and powerless against the forces he alone unleashes and controls in their own bodies. Joe loves especially how they look after they come, back arched, chest heaving, eyes closed and mouths open in little panting moans. Ripe and slippery, ready for him, beckoning, begging him to fill them up with his holy seed, with his heir. He flicks his tongue up and down, back and forth over the little button nestled between her lips, searching for a gasp of pleasure.

After the shock muzzing Keen’s perception settles, her mind clears. He’s trying to supple her up, trying to make her come. Dag told her Miss Giddy had told Joe a long time ago that an orgasm makes a woman the most fertile. Keen doesn’t know if there’s any truth to this, but she realizes now why Dag and Angharad tolerate Joe like they do. If nothing else, what he’s doing would slippery her up so his schlanger wouldn’t hurt as much going in.

Joe rolls his tongue over her clit, traps it gently between his tongue and his top teeth, sucks. Keen jerks as if she’s been zapped by a live wire. That one never fails. She is still wary; he feels it in the thick rope of her thigh muscles, taut as steel cables under his hands. His tongue wanders in figure eights up and down the length of her pussy, in between her inner lips, velvety, warm, spicy-sweet. Back up to her clit. Fast circles. Slow. He flicks his tongue, just a feather’s touch, now he nibbles. Keen gasps and shudders. Even though the Mechanic’s shot is still at full strength, he knows now that he doesn’t need it. The pain in his back and knee ebbs to the flow of lust, to the flow of Keen’s juices over his tongue.

Confusion rebuilds in Keen as the orgasm does. She shakes her head to clear it, but Joe’s insistent tongue does not let the dust settle this time. Joe does not give pleasure; he takes it. This has to be some sort of trick, a new twist in their game, a new way, like the guitar, for him to worm his way under her guard and hurt her. She knows what will come after she does. She knows it will be him. But that can’t be all. There has to be something else he wants from her, something more than just her duty as a baby factory, or else he wouldn’t go to this great length to disarm her. There has to be something else…

Like a gunshot, the orgasm blasts through her, up from her belly, driving all thought from her mind, squeezing the air out of her lungs and curling her hands into fists. Again, again it quakes her, shattering her defenses, shivering apart her ability to care.

Keen’s orgasm isn’t loud, but the arch in her back is fierce enough to lift her from neck to feet off the bed. Joe grins and licks his lips, dripping with her. Ah, delicious. She slowly sinks back down to the bed, chest heaving. Joe crawls up the length of her, dragging his tongue up as he goes. Curved belly, soft breasts, smooth neck, sharp chin, sweet lips. He settles himself between her legs and slips into her. The silky slickness of her, the heat of her draws a frayed gasp from him. The combination of the shot, his own need, and the time he spent on Keen has driven him closer to coming than he realized. Keen’s blank eyes are half closed, her mouth half open, her chin tipped up to bare the delicate skin of her neck and chest to him. Her body is loose, slack, pliant, from her orgasm. The woman beneath him, panting softly in time to his thrusts, is no longer Keen the Viper. She is Keen the Darkling, his wife, the mother of his strong crowhaired son. The ball of molten energy spinning deep in his belly begins to uncoil. He leans down into the smell of her hair, dusky and earthy, lightly perfumed by the flowers growing in the Vault. He plunges his tongue into her mouth as his orgasm rolls through him like a tank and into her, bulldozing her.

Joe’s orgasm is a grunting snarl into her mouth and one, two, three, four hot jet spurts inside her. She shivers with familiar revulsion at the sensation of it. His thick, fevered weight collapses on her and he buries his face into her hair, his rusty pants gusting hotly in her ear. The last aftershocks of her orgasm are gone. She swallows the taste of her own juices and the sour metallic tang of his mouth. It’s done, and it could have been worse.

He heaves himself off her, still wheezing. _Old man, old lungs,_ she chants. She shivers again at the slithery feeling of his schlanger sliding out of her, and again at the feeling of his come dripping out of her onto the sheets.

His heavy hand lands low on her belly, over the place where her orgasm had originated.

“In case that one didn’t take, I’ll breed you again tonight. You’ve been a very good girl, Keen. Daddy loves you.”

Keen groans softly. _And the goddess hates me._


	8. Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keen makes a new friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry this chapter is a day late! 
> 
> I've taken a few liberties with the layout of the Citadel in this chapter for the sake of the flow of the story. No warnings for this chapter.

Keen checks the door every night. Joe comes in and does something to the door to lock it. What, she doesn’t know, because there are no locks on the inside. It’s always immovable. But tonight, Joe brought Mechanic with him for Angharad’s checkup. Joe stayed. Mechanic left. Tonight…

Tonight there is a tiny breath of air sighing through a gap between door and jamb. She breathes deep of it. Braces. Throws her entire weight into the push, gritting her teeth against grunts of effort. Her feet begin to slide out from under her. The door does not budge. She mouths a silent prayer, then a curse. Pushes harder, her body tight and taut, muscles thrumming like wires.

Movement. Tiny. The gap widens. Once the door is in motion, the pushing is much easier. The hinges are well-oiled. No squeaks. _Thank goddess_. She stops when the door is just wide enough for her to fit through. She oils out, a silent shadow in the starlit dark. She pauses, scents the air. No guards.

_I’m out! I’m free! I’M FREE!_

The impulse to break into a sprint is so powerful that her feet twitch. No. Not like this. She’d be caught before she got down one level. As difficult as it is to admit, Angharad was right. She’d have to think of a plan first.

The smell of night lies thick. Using ears and nose honed over many years of living between survival and desert death, she picks her way on bare feet down an earthen hall, fingers brushing along the left wall. She clicks her tongue once, as crisply as she dares. The returning echoes tell her the hallway is relatively straight, roughly circular, with a ceiling twelve or so feet up at least. There are windows high on her right. The night breeze, whispering down from that direction, slices right through the gauzy wraps she wears and nips at her gooseprickled flesh. Better its teeth than his, she thinks, and shivers as much from revulsion as from chill.

Ahead, she picks up a monotonous _clink-clank_ and behind that, a muted hiss. Machines. _War machines. Have to be._

But instead of smelling steel and ozone and oil, she smells earth. The light sweet scents of flowers and fruits she recognizes from the Vault, and more scents she doesn’t. She is wary of the ratchety clanking, which mismatches with the smells of good earth and could hide a lurking warboy or several from her. She pauses, poised with one foot in the air.

_The worst that old smeg could do is put me back in solitary. This is already worth it._

Her feet carry her on, through a doorless arch into the clattery earth room. The ambient noises are enough to paint a clear picture, and her jaw drops at the spectacle of it: Rows upon rows of planters, turning over and over themselves on great gears, overflowing with growth. The rows end somewhere beyond her perception. A mist of cool water drifts down onto her, beads in her hair and turns into a galaxy of water-stars draped over her head in the moonlight. She tips her head back and breathes in the sweet green smells, rejoices in the whisper of mist. _The goddess is here. Mum was right. The goddess and her daughters are the earth and the rain and trees and flowers and they live. They still live._

For the first and only time, a ripple of hesitancy grows in her. Desperate as she is to get out, the thought of abandoning all this comforting green nearly breaks her heart.

_No. They still live. They live here; they lived in the Green Place; they have to live somewhere else. The entire world can’t be a wasteland. The books say there are seven continents. We only live on one. There has to be green somewhere else._

She moves forward. More machine-sounds ahead. Instead of clanking and hissing, though, these sounds are softer. Pumping. Sucking. No people sounds. She enters the room warily, creeping in a half crouch, head cocked and nostrils flared. The room is uncomfortably warm and humid, but not as stifling as Mechanic’s lair. The smells aren’t as bad here either, but they still put a pit of unease in Keen’s belly. The heady odors of flowers, as many that grow in the Vault and more, is almost overpowering, along with another cloyingly sweet smell that Keen can’t place. Under them, detectable enough for Keen to understand the flowers are there to mask it, is a sour tang, a little like Mothersmilk gone sour, a little like a body gone corrupt. She snorts the stink out of her nose and moves on.

Trickling water now. The air dries and cools slightly. The unfinished rock beneath her feet smooths into a polished flatness. She risks a soft click. Huge circular objects, four times her height, on either side of her. Water there too. An open room, with a squareish object in the middle. Something else, a chair on wheels? off to the right. Beyond the square is more blank room, then a floor-length window—walkway?—into nothing. Outside? She raises her head and scents the air, but the stink of sweet decay is still too thick. On the balls of her feet she creeps further into the room, her hand out to receive the touch of the squareish object.

“You’re a breeder.” The small voice behind her is an electric shock. She stifles a squeak, spins. “Breeders aren’t supposed to be out.”

A child. A warpup? Goddess, he is _quiet._

“You’ll get in trouble. The Immortan doesn’t like his breeders out.”

A warpup, definitely. Why is he here, then, in what has to be Joe’s throne room and not with the others in their tower? What would he do? Would he raise an alarm? Run to an Imperator? Keen crouches down, level with the voice. “My name is Keen. What’s yours?” she asks sweetly.

“Don’t got one,” says the pup. Wariness drips from his voice. “When I’m ready, the Immortan will gimme one.” The pup doesn’t sound a day over five years old, but he is already deeply indoctrinated. _This is insane. The boy’s balls haven’t even dropped and he’d take a bullet for that rusty old hypocrite._

“What do people call you?” She asks, compelled to reach out, to give him some other connection, some other contact than Joe, Joe, Joe.

“The Immortan sees you,” the boy intones reverently. “He sees everythin’. He knows you’re here and you best ask a lotta forgiveness when he finds you.” The monotone devotion in the warpup’s voice unwinds a thread of fear in Keen’s heart. Joe’s hold over his boys and pups is total. He has their minds, hearts, bodies, souls dancing in his hands, and they would thank him with their dying breath as he crushes them. To her and Angharad and Dag, Joe is a man. A cruel, grasping, clutching, covetous old sinner, but a man. To this pup and his dozens, maybe hundreds…thousands? more fellows and Joe’s followers, Joe is a king, a messiah, a warlord, a god. And _they_ are the sinners.

In idea flashes. “Yes,” Keen nods. “Yes he does see me. But he’s not coming, is he? He must not be angry, then, right? If he knows where I am and hasn’t come to get me yet, he must have let me go, right?”

That silences the boy. Perfect. Keen cocks her head, letting the sounds of the night flow in: the trickle and gurgle of the stilled water mill, the low whine of the wind around the ramparts of the tower, the distant but incessant pump and suck of the sour-sweet room, but no more footsteps. She had not heard the boy enter the room, and she would not be caught like that again. 

“What are you doing here, then?” The boy asks, still wary, but the edge lent by the surety of devotion is dulled. Keen suppresses a grin. This is easier than she thought. If she is careful, quick of wit… if she can finesse this the right way…

“I’m here to… to see. To learn. About his kingdom. His people. You.”

“Why?”

Half-wild clan babies or indoctrinated slaves, children are always curious, questioning. _Thank you, goddess, for sending me this child and not a man whose mind is a labyrinth of dead ends._ “Because I want to know why too.”

The pup is silent for a time. The wind picks up, moaning around the opening in the front of the room. Keen feels it tease her hair across her face. The breeze smells of iron, sand, salt, smoke, desert. The air in the Vault is pure and sweet, but Keen drinks in this breeze thirstily. It is free air. A great yearning breaks over her, squeezes her heart until it aches.

 “If the Immortan wants you out, why isn’t he with you?”

Keen’s mouth quirks up in a wry smile. She’d left the Vault to the dubious music of Joe’s cacophonous snores. Poor Angharad, trapped in the heavy embrace of a freight rig with breathing problems.  “He’s tending to my sisters.”

“Why does the Immortan want you to know his secrets?”

_Boy,_ Keen sighs, _if only you knew what secrets that greedy schlanger guards._ “Not his secrets, no. I wouldn’t presume to know those. I’m just a breeder after all. J—The Immortan wants me to know the full glory of his reign. He wants us to understand his wisdom, his mastery. The gardens, the water… you. You and the other pups and warboys. All of this,” she opens her arms in an all-encompassing gesture, “is evidence of the Immortan’s magnificence. He died, conquered death, and returned in splendor to build us this oasis in the wasteland. To redeem us.  If we stay locked in the Vault forever and never get to see this, how can we understand that? How can we know our glorious husband in fullness?” Keen finishes, breathless, unsure if the words she heard actually came out of her. _Goddess, he’s rubbing off on me._ She catches a laugh behind her teeth. 

A noise deep in the room, a scratch, soft as the slip of a snake’s belly over sand. She freezes, listens, barely breathing. Thirty seconds, fifty, a minute. Silence. Her bowstring muscles relax.

“How can you learn about the Immortan’s kingdom if you can’t see nothin’?” the pup asks, the last edge of wariness dropping away. She hears the small scrape of skin on stone. The pup sat. Keen follows suit.

"I can hear and smell and taste and touch, can’t I?”

“Coma the Doof Warrior’s blind. He don’t got no eyes at all.”

“Who’s Coma the Doof Warrior?”

“One of the Immortan’s favorite warboys. He plays the guitar on the Doof Wagon.”

“That’s it? He just plays guitar?”

“Whaddoya mean ‘that’s it’? It’s a real important job. He plays the Immortan’s songs. The songs of Valhalla. Songs to the glory of V8.”

“I see. Tell me about the other warpups. What do you and your friends do?”

“I don’t live with the other warboys. Not no more. The Immortan chose me to attend him. It’s the greatest honor. I put poultice on his knees. It pleases him and reminds him to stay here with us.”

_And it just happens to soothe the aches in his old joints,_ Keen thinks wryly. “So you live here? By yourself?”

“I live down two levels. With the other attendants and the Prime Imperators.”

Another noise to her left. A click. Closer. Keen freezes. “What was that?”

“Corpus Colossus,” says the pup.

“That’ll be all for now, little pup. Go on to bed,” a new voice burbles from her left. _Goddess curse me, how long has he been there?_  

Keen hears the pup rise and leave. She remains where she is, waiting. She knows who Corpus Colossus is, knows what he is. Knows, hopefully, that the only two in the room are them. The only thing she doesn’t know is what he’ll do, and whatever it is, she’d have time to run. She may not get very far, but she'd take as many out with her as she could.

“That, girl, was the finest horseshitting I’ve heard in a long time.”

Keen blinks. _What?_

“I’m not sure how you got out, but you clearly know what you’re doing if you got this far. You better scurry back, though. Dad won’t be kind to you.”

Keen’s brow furrows. Is this a trap? Is he lowering her guard while the pup runs for help? What is he doing?

“Don’t worry. Not a lot I can do to you from this chair. But it’s not me you ought to fear. Get going, girl, before Dad figures out you’re gone.”

Keen rises hesitantly, listening for running footfalls. Nothing. She steers her steps back the way she came, toward the water mill, past where she places Corpus’ voice. 

“If you do try to run,” Corpus says as she retreats, “I’ll see it. And I’ll raise the alarm. I have to. You understand.”

She nods, pads quickly through the sweet-decaying room. _What just happened? Was Corpus…actually kind to me? A blood-son of Joe’s?_  She hardens her resolve to talk to Corpus Colossus again as she crosses into the hydroponic gardens. She holds her hands out as she walks through the aisles, letting the dripping leaves brush her hands. She is reluctant to leave this wonderful riot of green, but she estimates she’s been gone for over an hour, and if Joe snores loud and long enough, someone would wake him. The thought sends icy little lizard feet skittering up and down her backbone. Her steps quicken. The Vault door is standing ajar, just as she left it. She oils back in and feels for a handle to close the door. The only thing her fingers find are raised disks of bolted metal. _Goddess curse me, how am I going to shut the door?_ She grabs the lip of the door and gives it an exploratory tug. It drifts closed. _Clank-click._ Automatic locks. A quiet peep of surprise and victory escapes her; she clamps her hands over her mouth.

_Idiot girl, what a time to get yourself caught._

But the rise-and-fall rhythm of Joe’s snores remains unbroken. Her shoulders sag with a relieved exhale. She tiptoes across the Vault to the common bedroom. Dag and Miss Giddy breathe evenly and deeply. Asleep. Good. She eases into her bed gingerly, cringing at each creak of the aged springs. Pulls the covers up to her chin. Lies still. Takes one breath. Three. Five. Ten.

Only then does she allow a jubilant grin to split her face nearly in half. _I did it I did it I did it I DID IT!_

“Enjoy your walkabout, dearie?” Miss Giddy whispers.


	9. Strike One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angharad bleeds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Self-harm TW.

Miss Giddy eases Angharad onto her birthing bed fifty days early. Joe bursts in minutes later, full of sound and fury, the filthy-mad Mechanic in tow. Keen and Dag are shoved unceremoniously out of the common bedroom, shut out, as if the disease of premature birth is a catching thing. Joe, for the first time since Keen arrived, completely ignores them.

Keen stands beside the doorway, her back against the wall. Dag, clutching her arm, peers around the arch into the bedroom, jangling with sound: the metallic tinkle of Mechanic’s surgical instruments, the creak of chairs and bedsprings, Miss Giddy’s soothing mumbles, Angharad’s strained pants, and straddling it all, the aural battering ram of Joe’s voice.

“What’s happening?” Keen asks.

“Joe’s fretting,” Dag says softly. “Angharad is so pale.”

Angharad’s scream rises above the other noises in the room, subsides. Keen takes a deep, shaky breath. _Goddess, bless and keep Angharad. Bring her out of this whole._ “Is it like this every time?”

“This is the first time I’ve seen.” Dag squeezes her arm. “Angharad is stronger than she knows. She’ll be okay.”

“But it’s too soon. Miss Giddy said so.”

“Yes. It’s too soon.”

The words, unheard by anyone in the birthing room, dangle in the air above them like a knife. Their sister screams again, agony fraying the edges of the sound. The coppery tang of blood flares Keen’s nostrils.

_Goddess, make me barren. Kill his children in me before their hearts start beating. I can’t bear his child. I can’t do this._

“Turn him around! If he’s breech, _turn him around!”_ Joe roars.

“ _Her,”_ Dag hisses, the sound muffled by the wall she is peering around.

“What is breech?”

Dag, taller than Keen by a few inches, leans down and puts her mouth close to Keen’s ear, as if they are in a hushed ritual hall instead of the Vault, cacophonous with noise. “Babies should come out head first. Breech is when they come out feet first. They could get choked on the umbilical cord or suffocate if their heads are stuck.”

Dread seeps into the chambers of her heart, sludging her blood, turning it cold. How could she possibly do what Angharad is doing now, has done for the past two hundred twenty days? How could she let that rusty, rotting hulk of a man infect her with his parasite, force her to keep it, nourish it, protect it for two hundred seventy days, then risk her own life to push it out of her? Out of an unwilling host into a corrupt and dying world that will start killing it the minute it draws its first breath?

Madness. This is madness.

_Kill him. He’s distracted now. Gouge his eyes out. Tear his throat, fangs or no fangs. His flesh is soft. He is no god. His flesh is soft. Kill him._

Her hands curl into claws at her sides; her lips peel back from her teeth in a savage snarl. She takes a breath. She is viper. She is krokodyle, and now the krokodyle will strike.

Angharad’s tortured squeal slices ice into Keen’s muscles, freezes them before they can launch her at Joe. Dag’s hand is a claw now, the bitten nails digging into her forearm. A sudden _clang-bang-tinkle_  of a metal tray and instruments clattering on stone. Keening sobs from Angharad. A wordless, window-rattling bellow from Joe. The sound, full of rage and grief, starts like the guttural rev of an engine, rises like the booming echo of a lion’s roar, and crashes down on Keen’s ears like the many-throated howl of a sandstorm. Keen’s heart stutters on unspent adrenaline from her almost-attack and a new jolt from the barbaric yawp still ringing in her ears.

The only sounds now are the hiccupping, screamy sobs Angharad tears from the air and the rusty hisses of Joe's furious iron and steel lungs. Keen does not have an aural map of the room. Doesn’t need one. There aren’t many things that could have drawn out those sounds from either Angharad or Joe. Dag throws her thin, bony arms around Keen’s neck and squeezes tight, burying her face in Keen’s shoulder. The last of the adrenaline leaks out of her muscles as she reaches up to return the embrace.

“Oh, Angharad,” Dag murmurs through her own quiet sobs.

“Angharad’s alive, Dag. And her child is beyond Joe’s reach,” Keen whispers soothingly. She feels Dag’s head nod into her collarbone. “Could you tell what it was?”

Dag sniffs. “It…it didn’t even look like a person.”

* * *

 Keen snaps awake at a lunging kick of her heart. Alarms buzz in her head, but the silence in the bedroom presents no source. No clank of door. No Joe.

Five breaths. Ten. Twenty.

There. A tiny sound at the very edge of her perception. Did she even hear it? She curses her pounding heart for sending blood roaring through her ears. Miss Giddy snores gently. Dag breathes. Angharad…

Where are Angharad’s breaths?

The sound comes again, both soft and far away.

_Where are Angharad’s breaths?_

Keen slips out of bed and creeps out into the Vault on the balls of her feet, her own breath coming in quick, shallow pants. Her ears lead her up the stairs. A pit of malignant dread grows black and heavy in her gut. The sound again, in the back corner of the upstairs bedroom: a groaning mew, muffled behind gritted teeth and tightened lips. “Angharad?” Keen whispers.

“Get out.” Angharad’s voice is flat and dead.

“Angharad, what…” Keen steps to the far corner of the room, squatting down because she’d heard her sister’s voice close to the ground. The acrid, coppery scent of blood slaps her. “Oh, goddess, Angharad, you’re _bleeding…”_   Keen reaches out and her hands are slapped away.

“Go _away_. Leave me alone.”

Keen’s heart twists with dread and confusion. Why is she bleeding? Where is she bleeding from? Is it because of the miscarriage? Some new complication? Why hadn’t she called Miss Giddy? Why had she hidden away instead of—

Realization hits her harder than any blow Joe had ever struck.

“ _Miss Giddy_ ,” Keen shouts, her voice high and thready with fear, “Angharad’s blee--”

A hand, slick with bitter blood, clamps over her mouth. “ _No,”_ Angharad growls, but it’s too late. Keen hears the quick whisper of two pairs of feet. She pulls Angharad’s hand away from her mouth, her entire being roiling with revulsion. How could she? Not Angharad. Not gracious, noble, steadfast Angharad. _Click._ A lamp turning on. Dag gasps. Miss Giddy beside her.

“Get away from me,” Angharad drones weakly.

“Dag, fetch two clean cloths and water. Do you know where the alcohol is?” Miss Giddy asks, her voice crisp and businesslike.

“In the chest by your bed.” Dag’s voice is steady.

“It’s in a glass bottle with C-three-H-eight-O on the label. Bring it. Quickly.”

The quiet _tp tp tp_ of Dag’s footfalls diminishes down the stairs. Angharad coughs a chuckle. “Oh. I should have used glass. That would have been better.”

_Oh great goddess, what_ happened _to her? Why did she_ do  _this?_

“Hush, child,” Miss Giddy murmurs. “There’ll be no more of that kind of talk. Give me that.” Keen hears the crisp click of a set of scissors closing. Miss Giddy’s hand rests on her right shoulder. “Switch places with me, dearie. She’s bleeding on that side of her face.”

_Her face?!_

“I don’t need your help! Just leave me alone!” Angharad snaps.

Keen shuffles to her right, stepping over Angharad’s outstretched legs, as Miss Giddy crosses behind her to her left. Dag’s footsteps return. “Here,” she said, and Keen hears liquid sloshing in a glass bottle.

“Keen, hold this like this,” Miss Giddy says and places a thickness of folded cloth in Keen’s cupped hands. Water is poured over it, weighing it and cooling it. She allows herself to be moved and placed where Miss Giddy needs her. Her mind is a howling emptiness. Miss Giddy takes pieces of wet cloth from her hands. The bottle sloshes. “This’ll sting,” Miss Giddy murmurs. Angharad hisses. "Here, Keen, you next." Miss Giddy presses a cloth to her face and wipes Angharad's drying, crusted blood away from her mouth and chin and cheeks. The sour bite of the alcohol sears her nostrils. 

Minutes pass in fraught silence as Miss Giddy tends Angharad's wounds. “Tch,” Miss Giddy chides distractedly. “You cut deep. There’ll be scars.”

“ _Good._ ” The word sizzles white-hot with hatred, and suddenly Keen understands.

 “You know you’ll probably catch hell from Joe for this," Keen says. It isn't a question.

“If you can endure it, so can I. Joe doesn’t scare me anymore.”

 The storm of fear and confusion in Keen’s mind has calmed now that she knows her sister is safe. In the calmness, a new emotion surfaces: bitter pride.

“We are not things,” Angharad says, the words soft and cold and final. Keen holds out a hand. Angharad grips it. They squeeze.

"We are not things.”


	10. Quickened

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keen has a few panic attacks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shortish chapter! I had to drag this one out of me. NaNoWriMo on top of this has been kicking my butt. 
> 
> Mild violence and suicide TW.

It’s been ten days. Her blood is ten days late now.

_Ten days goddess no no I’m not I’m not no no please no no…_

It’s been too many days for denial. Keen scrunches her hands into her hair and curls herself inward, resting her head on her knees. Panic slams her heart against her chest, fuzzes out thought and makes her breath come in trembling gasps. A strangled sob bursts from her lips. She’s trapped now, truly trapped, trapped in this place, trapped by a man who has now trapped her in her own body, forced her to carry a parasite, _his_ parasite. Angharad was right. There was one last thing Joe could take from her: use of her own body. Now he has her. All of her.

But there is one way out left. If she ends her life, she’d escape. That’s it. She has to die. That’s the only way—

A small knock on the latrine door. “Keen? Are you all right?” Angharad.

She sucks in a breath, swallows the tears and snot gumming up her nose and throat. “Fine.”

After a long silence, she hears Angharad again, soft and low. “Pray for a miscarriage, Keen.”

_How did she…?_

Keen mashes the heels of her hands into her eyes, trying to wipe away the tears that haven’t come yet but already sting her eyes. She wraps the damnably clean, dry cloth up between her legs and around her hips and steps out. Hands on her shoulders. An embrace. Dag’s scent.

“Pray for the baby to die before it leaves you.” Angharad beside her.

The knot of fear, panic and anger grows deep in Keen’s belly and forces tears from her eyes. “I can’t do this, I can’t, I can’t,” she sobs, clinging to Dag, burying her face in the young woman’s shoulder. A comforting hand strokes her hair and a high, sweet hum sounds in her ear.

“Joe will treat you better now,” Angharad says. “He’ll treat you like a fragile egg. He’ll even be gentle when he fucks you.”

A pure white spear of terror knifes through Keen and she rips herself from Dag’s embrace, backs away. “No, you can’t tell Joe! _You can’t!”_

“We have to, child.” Miss Giddy behind her. She whirls, backs up the other way.

“No, no, _no, NO!”_

She knows that if Joe knows, his hold over her is complete. She can’t face that truth, that horrible, wrenching truth that she will never be rid of him now, even after the baby is out of her, she will never be able to forget what he planted in her, his parasite, his power, his control…

She bolts, not knowing or caring where she’s going, runs until she finds a wall, clings to it, presses herself against it, tries to press herself _into_ it, to disappear, to become part of the stone, to be anywhere but here and anyone but her. Sobs tear her lungs as she sinks down to a crouch and hugs her knees.     

The whisper of cloth as Dag kneels beside her.

Her voice is weak, wet, whiny. She can’t help it. “Please don’t tell Joe. Please. _Please._ ”

“We won’t. But he’ll find out sooner or later.”

A hand on her back. Angharad.

“Pray for a miscarriage, Keen. That’s all you can do.”

 

* * *

 

Joe steps into the Vault to sounds of retching. Angharad and Dag, standing by the impluvium, glance nervously at the latrine. Alarm bells in his head ringing, he strides to the latrine and hammers on the warped wooden planks of the door. 

“Fine,” A wavery gasp sounds from inside. Keen. “ ’m fine. Just ate some bad fruit.” Another retch. He knows what vomit means. How long has it been since she bled? A cycle yet? He’s been preoccupied with Splendid’s miscarriage, her unfortunate scarring, and the discovery of an abandoned aircraft hangar to the west. He spins his mental calendar backward… more than a cycle now, he recalls. His heart kicks once against his ribs. How _much_ more?

“Miss Giddy!” He calls. She cracks open the door, and Joe has time to catch a glimpse of Keen slumped on her knees in front of the toilet before the door shuts. “When was the last time she bled?”

The tiny, shriveled woman's storm-grey eyes glint in the low lamplight.  “Forty-five days ago.”

Forty-five days. A cycle and a half. “Pregnant,” he rasps.

Miss Giddy nods, her lips thinning to a knife-edge.

Immortan Joe catches a bark of laughter in his throat. He can’t let himself accept the good news wholeheartedly until the Organic Mechanic can confirm, but forty-five days is enough to lift the great burden on his shoulders just a fraction.  Keen the Darkling, pregnant. It’s about fuku-damned time.

His heir, his proud crowhaired son, materializes in front of his eyes: strong like Rictus, sharp like Corpus, ruthless like Scrotus. Perfect in every way. Pale blue eyes sparking, he pushes past Miss Giddy and into the dimly lit latrine. He barely notices the sour stench of vomit or the twinge in his knees as he kneels beside his blackhaired wife. She is limp and panting, hanging over the edge of the toilet. He drops a heavy, powdered hand on her shoulder. Delight is a glowing sun in his chest; is the eternal, burning heart of a god.

“What better way to move on from the loss of one son than to celebrate the creation of another? A great honor has been bestowed upon you and a great treasure lives within you now, my Darkling Keen. Rejoice; you are the mother of a god’s son.” He feels the muscles of her shoulder go taut. She retches again. He swings to his feet, pride in check but still swelling his chest. Splendid and Dag stand ready for him, dressed and demure. What a grand sight. One ripe fruit plucked and tucked safely away and two more, sweet and juicy, practically begging to be picked. His cock swells. Full and strong on divinity and lust, Joe takes Angharad’s arm and leads her up the stairs, the blood and screams between them flown from his mind. His favorite wife’s eyes flash as he pushes her down on the creaky, swaybacked bed, but she opens to him as tractably as she’s always done. Keen’s defiance has begun to spread to Dag, who spits and bites like a slinking housecat. But his Splendid, his beloved one, still welcomes him with her whole body. Though she has failed him once, he forgives her. There will be more chances, and his Splendid will deliver. Keen may fail him. His blackhaired heir may not spring from her belly. It would sting, but there was hope in Angharad. If Keen would not deliver, Splendid would. He has no doubt.

He plunges his tongue into her mouth and his cock into her cunt and is redeemed and Redeemer at once.

* * *

Keen’s pregnancy progresses in a hurricane of seesawing hormones. One day she is almost docile; the next Joe narrowly avoids a hail of books aimed at his head. He has experienced these mood swings before, but not quite to this extent. The first time it happened, many years ago, he’d boxed the woman’s ears soundly; this only seemed to make her angrier. He then punished the woman by confining her in quarantine. Two days later, he’d come back to find her on her back and bleeding out, a twisted wire stuck up her cunt. It does not take godlike omniscience to see the same capacity for such desecration of his seed in Keen’s bearing. No, he would leave her in the Vault with Miss Giddy. To be watched. Constantly.

Joe calls the Organic Mechanic up to examine her monthly, as he does with all of his wives. But unlike with any of his previous wives, the Mechanic never leaves Keen without a new wound. The first time, a day after Miss Giddy told him the good news, the Mechanic had barely stepped into the Vault when she flew at him full tilt, shrieking like a nightmare with flying black hair, bugging white eyes, and gaping red mouth. It took both Joe and the Mechanic to subdue the shrieking Fury while Dag and Angharad watched with something like vindication in their eyes.

“If this’n turns out anything like either of his parents, I’m not sure I want to be around when he’s grown and angry,” the Mechanic chuckles, stepping outside the Vault after Keen’s sixty-day checkup. His left eye is puffed shut and purple-black. “May give ol’ Scrotus a run for ‘is money.”

Despite his irritation, pride swells Joe’s chest. If this child lives, survives, thrives, he would be mighty indeed. A Prince befitting the title; a Master of the Wasteland, a Demigod born of the coupling of unquenchable ferocity and unconquerable will.


	11. Human

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joe needs cuddles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is brought to you by His Royal Highness Stephen King; in particular his holy tome "On Writing". I would not be getting through this month, this story, and NaNoWriMo without him. Even if you never intend to publish anything you write, if you want to get better at writing, read. That. Book. Mash it into your eyeholes and/or earholes. And then go read the rest of his works. Long live the King.
> 
> No warnings for this chapter.

Immortan Joe lies awake in his bed, sheets kicked into a knot at his feet, feeling every ache in every bone, every sore on his skin, every ounce of the herculean burden of a god on his aging shoulders. Most keenly he feels the tiny bodies of his dead children, the velvet slickness of his wives’ blood, on his hands. Angharad's ghosted screams float through his mind again. Strike one against her. Against him? He’s lost count. Many and many, and no amount of mental scrubbing could erase the haphazard tally marks carved into the inside of his skull. They don’t just count children lost; they mark pieces of himself tossed to the scouring wind. He only has so many pieces to lose. How many more chips off the great monolith of his divinity will it take before it finally topples?

He heaves himself up and sits with his legs dangling off the edge of the bed and his head in his hands. The pain lancing through his back, hips and knees settles back into its normal low drone. He stares down at his small, soft cock, asleep in its nest of silver hair. It would not stir without a shot from the Organic Mechanic, but Joe is too sore to make the trek down and too restless to wait for him to come up. Gingerly he makes his way to the Vault. He’d risk Keen and her pregnancy hormones tonight. He needs to feel his living son: the promise of a future in this atrophied wasteland; the promise of peace for him and redemption for the thousands who look to him for succor and deliverance.

Keen wakes with a small peep of surprise. The walk up the stairs is blessedly free of thrown books or punches, which he counts as a double blessing given his sore joints sapping the strength from him. Blind though she is, he knows Keen can sense it. Even when he doesn’t limp. _I named her more aptly than I knew._

“Feeling your age tonight, old man? Will you be able to get it up?” The acid in Keen’s voice is dulled by sleep. He ignores it and pulls her into the bed. The mattress is older and thinner than his and worse for his back, but nevertheless he feels some of the pain slip away as he draws her close and rests his hand on the precious curve of her belly. He heaves a thick sigh and closes his eyes.

“What are you doing?” Keen’s voice is wary, fully awake now.

“What I please.”

Keen blinks. This is so far outside of her experience of him that she is stopped in her tracks, mind and body. There are two times in Keen’s memory Joe visited the Vault without the intent of breeding his wives, but it was always his favorite Angharad who had the dubious honor of being his bedmate in those cases. Why her now?

_Because you’re pregnant, you idiot. Angharad miscarried and he’s probably still sore about losing his first son by his favorite wife._

The realization strikes her oddly. Joe feeling anything other than greed, anything at all, really, is an idea that had never entered her head.

_He is human, after all. Or were you on your way to believing he is a god?_

Not a god, but she had not believed Joe was entirely human.

His breathing is deep and slow and even. It rasps a little even without the mask. She is on her back and he has himself pressed to her side. She is used to his smell: motor oil, chalky powder, old sweat and a faint rancid odor that reminds her of the sweet-decaying room. The feel of his skin, cool and dry in places, hot and clammy in places, no longer repulses her. It isn’t quite learned helplessness or Stockholm Syndrome (she’d listened to Angharad read a book on how minds got sick just like bodies), but the continent of his skin holds a morbid fascination now that she understands she could not catch whatever disease makes his flesh bubble and crack. The heavy hand on her belly is large and warm and thick with callus, always grasping, clutching, holding. Immortan Joe’s grip is sure and strong. It has to be.

The contrast between his hand and the arm attached to it is stark. His skin is the skin of an old man: unpleasantly cool, doughy, loose. Divots pucker where old pustules have burst; new sores rise from his skin in smooth clumps or leave it raw and oozing. The rest of his body carries the same topography. Keen feels his chest, a spongy furnace, press against her side. Wonders how many years he has left. Can’t be many, not with bones as brittle, flesh as pulpy, lungs as shredded as his.      

She remembers the second time he fucked her, five days after he brought her to the Vault. Most of her wounds had healed and she’d gotten her strength back. She thrashed like a krokodile regardless of the broken rib, throwing every punch and kick she knew, clawing, biting, a fury of limbs and teeth. With the exception of the kick to his knee, he’d absorbed every blow she doled out without flinching, dodged every snap of her teeth, tossed her around like a bunch of rags. For all his weakness, even Keen’s muscles couldn’t best his. It’s a bitter irony.

The baby moves inside her. _Parasite._

Joe’s hand moves; he felt it. “My son.” His voice idles like an engine.

“It could be a girl.” Silence. Curiosity overwhelms her. “What do you do with girls? You kill them, don’t you?”

“Of course not.”

“I was almost hoping you’d say you throw them off the top of the tower.”

“Why would I waste a life so wantonly?”

“Asks the man who tosses warboys into the jaws of death every day.”

“They go willingly, because they are redeemed and live again in Valhalla. They are helping me build a new world on the ashes of this one. That is their part. Your part is to provide me an heir fit to continue my legacy and to help me repopulate my new world with strong, healthy children.”

_The deluded old sinner’s got a point. Strong, healthy children are something this world desperately needs. What it does not need, though, is_ Joe’s _strong, healthy children. If there is such a thing as a strong, healthy child by Joe._ Miss Giddy said Joe is too old, too sick to produce an heir. He’d been trying for longer than Keen has been alive, and every passing year his seed grew weaker and more corrupted. She suppresses a shiver. What kind of abomination would she birth when the time came?

The baby kicks again. Joe’s heart swells. Keen will give him this strong son, and Angharad will give him another. And another. The pain jangling in his joints calms further. His eyes slip closed.

He wakes with a jolt. A shove on his shoulder. “Wake _up,_ ” Keen moans. “You’re snoring.” She mumbles something else that sounds like _hippopotamus_ and rolls over to the edge of the bed, throwing a pillow over her head with a soft  _fwump_.


	12. Prayerfully Done

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A thing happens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Blood TW. Apologies for any inaccuracy in biology here. I could only research childbirth so much before I started dry-heaving.

Three hammering knocks on his bedroom door. Joe wakes with a snort and a start, nerves and joints jangling.

Organic: “Your filly’s foalin’, boss.”

 _My son._ His heart launches itself into his throat. Ignoring the pain in his back and knees and hips, he yanks his legs into the pair of trousers he’d dropped on the floor a few hours ago and stumbles out the door in front of Organic, mask and armor and boots forgotten. His blackhaired son, tall and strong and perfect, walks beside him now, ice blue eyes mirroring his. The word “father” ghosts across his lips. Joe clenches his fist against the impulse to reach out for him. “Is she fully dilated?” he rasps, his voice roughened by sleep.

“Fully, and pushin’. Been a few hours already. Her hips ain’t too good for foalin’. Little narrow,” Organic says as they step into the Vault. “After the last false start, I didn’t want to wake ya unless it was the real deal.” The only light in the Vault emanates from the common bedroom, where Miss Giddy and Organic had pulled in lamps to better light the birth. He barely registers Dag and Angharad hovering just outside the archway.

A red knife of anger slices through him. A few hours? The baby could be half out of Keen by now. He claps his hand down on Organic’s shoulder outside the bedroom, his gritty growl low and dangerous. “Never wait that late again, Organic. Call me as soon as Miss Giddy calls you.”

“Right-o, boss.” The Mechanic nods, never fazed much by Joe’s threats, and steps into the room. Joe follows.

Keen lies naked on her back, propped up by pillows and Miss Giddy’s hand. The dome of her belly, huge now, arcs between her chest and spread legs. If it weren’t the same color as the rest of her, Joe wouldn’t believe it to be a part of her. Her eyelids are at half mast and her mouth gapes slack. Her crowblack hair is limp and plastered to her face in soggy ropes, and the slick sheen of sweat on her body glows yellow in the dim lamplight. Her breaths are rapid and shallow.

Joe is not squeamish. He shoulders the Mechanic aside and bends down to see the purplish dome the baby’s head, wreathed by her pubic hair. Threads of crowdark hair drip with blood, puddling under Keen. She pants and pushes, groaning, sobbing. He has been present for the births of all of his children, and he knows by now the timing and rhythm of it. This is not a normal birth. If it’s been hours already since she started active labor, it’s taking too long.

“Organic,” he says, his voice tight, “something’s wrong.”

“Right-o,” the Mechanic chirps and resumes his place at the end of the bed, his hands full of steel instruments. Joe’s eyes are locked on the back of the Mechanic’s head, eclipsing his view of his baby’s head. His heart hammers in his chest. This one must live. This will be his heir, his proud strong son. This one must live. He pours all of his will into Keen, into the child.

_Push, girl, push him out._

She lets her head sag back with a watery moan.

 _No, not yet._ He drops to one knee by her head and grips her shoulder. Her skin burns with fever. “ _Push,_ woman,” he urges, keeping his voice low so it won’t break. “Where is all the strength you use to defy me? Where is your bite, viper? _Push!”_

Her breaths slow and deepen. Her eyes close. She grits her teeth and braces against another contraction, the muscles on her arms, chest, back and neck taut as tripwires.

“Fang it again, girl; yer cord’s ‘round his neck,” The Mechanic says.

Joe’s heart swoops. He rears back to the Mechanic’s side. The baby’s head is ghastly purple, veins marking its surface almost black in the dimness. The Mechanic pries a finger between the baby’s neck and the cord. “Cut the cord. Cut it now,” Joe hisses hoarsely.

“Can’t,” the Mechanic says. “Don’t wanna nick an artery. Baby’s not breathin’ yet either. If I cut the cord now, it’ll cut off its oxygen and kill it for sure.”

“Push, fuku-damn you, woman, _push!”_ Joe roars at Keen.

“I’m _trying,”_ she shrieks. Her skin, a few shades darker than his other wives’, is pale now, pale like her eyes, like her bared teeth. Miss Giddy holds her shaking hand, smooths her fevered brow as she is wracked by contraction after contraction. Angharad and Dag are ghosts in the doorway, moon-faced and silent. Joe rakes his hands through his hair, clenches and unclenches his fists, helplessness pulling him apart. Blood, turned the color of an oilslick by the dimness, seeps down the sheets and Joe watches a single drip hang from the hem, bunch, let go.

“Get the shoulders out, little filly, and you’re done,” the Mechanic says.

“Pull it out of her,” Joe barks.

“Can’t do that either, boss. Could rip her insides up.”

“ _Then what good are you?”_ he roars. The Mechanic ignores him, elbow-deep in his wife. She screams with the next contraction, a high, thready sound, no force behind it. She is at the end of her endurance. _My son must live. This one must live._ Panic clatters like a bull through his brain and destroys coherent thought in a crash-jangle.

“One more push; come on, dearie, one more push now; you can do it,” Miss Giddy chants soothingly. Joe sees Keen’s next contraction more than he hears it; her entire body seems to curl in on itself in a convulsion of agony. She tears a ragged wheeze from the air, then her entire body goes limp.

“Pop goes the weasel,” singsongs Organic.

“My son,” Joe murmurs, reaching for the baby.

“Actually, your daughter.” Organic says around the rusty hemostat gripped in his teeth as he turns the baby over, lifts it, examines it. “Actually actually, your, eh, late daughter. Sorry, boss, nothing for it. She stayed in too long.” He holds something out to Joe.

The thing in Organic’s gnarled hands is a soggy purple lump. He does not see a baby. He sees a failure. Organic’s. Keen’s. The vision of his tall strong proud son blurs in a haze of defeated rage. _Fuku-damn them both. Wretch. Ungrateful viper._

A strangled sound, halfway between sob and cough, burps up from Keen. She lies on the bed, limp and soaked with sweat, one arm over her eyes. She makes the noise again. And again. Joe cocks a bushy black eyebrow.

She is laughing.

The fit builds until she cackles and howls, curled in on herself, wracked with it just as she was with contractions. Joe gapes, as baffled as Miss Giddy and Organic. After a long time, Keen falls back onto the bed again, panting as if she’s just sprinted a mile. Joe can’t tell if it’s a grin splitting her face or a rictus of pain. “The goddess answered my prayers,” she wheezes, and her head falls limply to the side.

 

* * *

 

Keen has dissolved. She floats outside herself, feeling the freedom of nothing and the choking press of everything. Voices drift in and out of her awareness, genderless, meaningless.

“…lost a lotta blood. Needs time to heal.”

"...can't do a lot for the pain since Organic Mechanic didn't leave much..."

Her daughter, dead before she could draw breath. Killed by her own body turned traitor.

_I prayed for it. I prayed for a dead baby._

The fury boiling in Joe’s presence; the dangerous grief wrenching his breaths from his respirator.

“Is she all right? She’s been sleeping for three days…”

_The goddess answered my prayers._

Regret. Relief. Sorrow. Vindication. Anguish for a child she never wanted. Bitter glee that her child escaped Joe’s corruption.

A gentle shake on her shoulder. “Keen, child, wake up.” Miss Giddy.

Hissing in-breath. Out-breath. Joe.

When the world was kinder, before humanity sliced compassion’s throat and shot empathy in the belly, when the luxury of a soul was still possible, Joe heard it told that one’s eyes were a window to it. It was an easy enough thing to believe and an easier thing to look through the window with practice. A calculating, observant mind sharpened still by years of military training gave Joe the ability to read people and read them well, not just their eyes. Very little of a person, from a dart of the eyes to a shift of the posture, escaped his notice. It was this ability coupled with his burning, driving will to rule, to _dominate,_ that had, more than anything else, turned him into a god. He could sense fear in the set of a man’s shoulders; defiance in the plant of his feet. To those of weaker will and lesser skill, Joe became omniscient, seeming to know the run of their thoughts before they themselves did. The more minds he controlled, the more control he gained. Until the barest flick of his ice-blue eyes was enough to drive warboys to their knees, crying _Immortan, Immortan, Redeemer_.

But Keen’s eyes were never windows; always doors. Closed to him. Never focused; always staring past him, through him, to a point beyond the walls of the Vault. Save for what Joe had come to think of as her default expression of angry defiance, she’d learned to keep her face as blank as her eyes. But what she lacked in eye contact and facial expression she made up in body language. He’d learned to read the flare of her nostrils, the turn of her head, the lines of her body as they tensed and unfurled. But for all his knowing of her, she skirts his omniscience like a silver-sided fish flicking away from a lure.

Joe looks down at her now, nothing written on her body to read. She is on her back on the bed, hand resting on her ribs, sightless eyes staring up through his skull. Joe opens his mouth to ask Miss Giddy if she is awake, but she blinks. Her body, still as stone; her face, smooth as stone; her eyes, the color of stone, call up a memory of marble statues with yawning white voids for eyes. Miss Giddy has braided her crowblack hair into a rope which lies like a dead snake between her arm and breast. Against his will, his eyes travel down to her belly. It’s still a little risen with the ghost of his child. He clamps his mind down against a pang of grief. Gods do not bleed. Gods do not sweat. And gods certainly do not shed mortal tears.

She’d chrome up in a few days. Then he’d try her again. And again.

* * *

         

Dag settles on the pile of pillows beside Keen. “Brought you a peach.” A fuzzy ball drops into her hands. A corner of her mouth lifts up and drops immediately, as if the effort of maintaining the smile is too great. “They’re good. Sweeter than last time.” A soft wet squishing sound. “Mmm. Miss Giddy says people in the Before would mix different sorts of fruits together,” Dag says, her words slurred by a mouthful of fruit. “Like plums and apricots. Pluots.” Dag giggles. “That’s a funny word. Pluot. Do you think we’ll ever have pluots here?”

“Dag, we don’t even have plums or apricots here,” Angharad says from the bath pit in the middle of the Vault floor. Keen hears gentle splashes as she washes Joe off her.

She takes a bite of peach. Cool juicy sweetness explodes in her mouth. It is not as crisp as an apple; not as tart as an orange. It is light and comforting and makes her ache and she does not realize she is crying until Dag embraces her.

Her body folds inward, her forehead meeting her knees. Keening sobs wrack her, burning her lungs and twanging her muscles. Her mind is a sandstorm, every grain a different emotion, bouncing off every other one in an unknowable chaos that spins and scours her insides. Her mouth opens and words tumble out, as if running for their lives from the melee in her head: “I don’t understand! I don’t understand any of this. Why am I sad? Why am I angry? I didn’t want any of this! I hate this and I hate him! I didn’t want his child; I prayed for it to die! I prayed to the goddess to take this child from him. I never wanted it in the first place! So why do I miss it? Why do I miss a child I never wanted? Why do I feel so guilty for wanting it taken away from Joe? I don’t understand _I don’t understand what’s happening to me!”_

Weak. She is weak. She is a sagging, fractured mess. Joe has finally broken her, unmade her. Her teeth are finally gone. Not the teeth Mechanic took from her in his hot festering room so many days ago; her viper teeth, the teeth that hissed in her mind, hissed and roared their defiance at Joe, drove her to draw every drop of blood from him that she could, to remind him with every breath she drew that he is no god, he is mortal, he is no god, he bleeds, he bleeds beneath her bite.

God or mortal, he still owns her, controls her. He has pushed something into her, pulled something out of her, left her used and hollow, a stranger in her own skin. No matter how much she fought, she never could have stopped him. She understands that now. She can make him bleed, turn his bones to knives that stab him with every step, but none of that will loose his hold on her.

She reaches behind her to dig her fingernails into the raised scar on the back of her neck. Her fingers know the shape well by now: a circle aflame, a screaming skull through the center bar. His mark. The signal to everyone forevermore that she is the property of Immortan Joe.

Property.

_Things._

The word cuts deep, squeezes more hot, bitter tears from her eyes, more gut-twisting sobs from the hollow place in her were Joe’s legacy died.

The sandstorm in her mind subsides, leaving her insides blasted bare and empty; leaving drifts of heavy, featureless sand sitting in the empty chambers of her heart.

_We are things. We belong to Joe. We always will._


	13. Awareness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keen figures a few things out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hestitate to call a TW for non-con, but I guess this is as close to consensual as it gets. I don't know about you but I'm sick of all this lack of smut good thing the next chapter has a lot of sin in it so prepare yourselvessss yes.

“The Organic Mechanic said after fifteen days you could resume your duties. I have given you twenty. That’s more than you deserve.” He holds out his hand to Keen, rolled into a ball on her bed. She heaves a great, slow sigh. Uncurls herself from the covers. Rises from the bed and walks mechanically past him, out of the room, past Dag and Angharad, toward the staircase, stepping out of her white gauzy wraps as she goes. He arcs a heavy black eyebrow. _What the fuk-ushima…?_

His hand lands on her bare shoulder halfway up the stairs. She stops but does not turn. “Would you rather do it somewhere else?”

“No.”

She continues up. His hand falls away. Two steps, and it grips her again, tighter this time. Irritation blows through her like a sudden gust of wind and dies as suddenly. There is no use for it. Joe would do with her as he pleases, and Keen can only go where he points her. “We can do it on the stairs if that’s what you want.”

His steps draw him even with her on the staircase. She feels him close to her, gazing down at her. His presence isn’t as hot, urgent, frantic as it usually is. Keeping her guard up, keeping her wife-face on, is utterly exhausting now. She wants to get this done and to go back to her bed and burrow under the blankets and sleep, sleep for a million days. So of course, the first time she puts up no fight, he wants to pick one. She heaves another deep sigh. “What do you want.” It is not a question.

This sagging, spiritless creature staring at his chest is the empty shell of the Keen he has come to know. It’s as if she’d poured all her fire, all her spirit, into the baby, and it died with the child. He didn’t realize he actually missed it until it was gone. The fight in her infuriates him… and energizes him. All of his wives fight him for a while, in their own way, except for one, but he’s never had a wife with as much venom and grit. Since he became Immortan, his will has never been questioned or challenged as fiercely and doggedly as by Keen. He hates it, hates her feral ingratitude…and, fuku-damn him, he loves it. Here in the Vault, where his godhood isn’t at real risk, he likes her letting her fight him. It makes the winning, the mastery of her, that much sweeter. He loathes himself a little for admitting it, but he’s addicted to it now, addicted to the feeling of her thrumming muscles under his hands, addicted to the tiny clicking sounds her teeth make as they snap on empty air.

Keen hears four outbreaths. Three in. “Life in you.”

She raises her arms and lets them fall in a _here-I-am_ gesture. “Well, I’m not going to get nakeder.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

_Goddess above, the old smeg will never be pleased._ “Make up your mind, old man. Do you want me willing or wild?”

Hissing out-breath. In-breath. Held. Out. “Both.”

For the first time in days, an expression drifts over her face like clouds over the moon. It is anger. _Of course. Willing until he wants me wild._

An idea explodes to the surface of her mind like a krokodyle and clamps its jaws on her. She suppresses a gasp.

She knows how to get out.

She knows how to get all four of them out.

It would take time, she understands, and it would take her doing things almost too repulsive to think about, but if it works, oh, if it works, she and Dag and Angharad and Miss Giddy would be free. Free.

_Should I tell them? No. It’s better that they not know, not until they have to. If Joe finds out what I’m doing before the time, their ignorance will save them. Hopefully._

Joe catches the lightning-quick blink of light in her eyes. He grips her arm and leads her to bed. She follows him readily, spreads her legs without resistance, accepts his pushes and grunts and come in silence. She does her duty as obediently and serenely as he never thought she would. And it’s a fuku-damned disappointment.

* * *

 

As much as Keen loathes to admit, Angharad and Dag were right. Things do go more smoothly when she doesn’t fight. She can’t bring herself to feign affection or desire, not yet, but as the days turn to weeks, as her escape plan evolves into a landmark on the of the map of her mind, her deep and abiding hate for Joe quiets to a simmer.

She learns to read Joe too, which her automatic and total opposition to him prevented her from doing before. She reads his footsteps for pain; his voice for mood; his breathing for greed. Before he even lays hands on her, she knows exactly what he wants from her and how much rebellion he’ll tolerate. She adjusts herself accordingly; gives him exactly what he wants and feels the sizzling rage around him slowly cool. It is a marvelous new awareness. She is defying him in a way she has never done before: subtly, successfully. She is playing her own game now, and he has no choice but to play along.

Keen measures her growing hold over Joe by how far he settles into the songs his wives play for him. He asks them for music almost every time he visits the Vault now. Keen’s smoky contralto blends beautifully with Angharad’s trilling soprano. Dag’s fingers dance over the keys of the grand piano that now resides in the Vault with sublime grace, accompanied occasionally by Keen’s novice fingers picking at the strings of the guitar Joe had given them. On a bad day, Joe sits quietly and listens, slumped in his chair. On a good day, he taps his foot in time to the music. On a very good day, Keen hears the rocky rumble of his hum harmonizing with them.

She keeps smug grins, sneers and snarls off her face now. She is playing the part of the dutiful, submissive wife. She is breaking into him with head bowed instead of fists swung.

So they circle around each other in a truce only Keen knows is temporary. She is scorpion. She is wasp. She is viper, toothed again. She is krokodyle, lying still, lying still.


	14. Touch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keen snakes her way into Joe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No warnings. Unless you find the general concept of sex with a gross old man trigger worthy. If so, why the fuck are you reading this?

_If I hear one more fuku-damned word about that Howitzer I’m going to sit him on his F-34 and spin him._

Kalashnikov is Joe’s friend, ally, brother. The only one. But the cantankerous fucking string bean could be a mighty pain in the ass. A wasted week Joe spent at the Bullet Farm trying to hammer out a new trade agreement with the bastard, pretending not to hear his gripes peppered amongst the salt of his good-natured jabs at Joe.

It’s good to be home. Home to his Imperators who don’t offer him the hot barrel of a rifle to curl his hair on. Home to his warboys who don’t pat the belly of his armor and ask how the baby is doing. Home to his wives, who don’t beg for Howitzers with every second breath. Home to his wives, who do what he tells them, who live for him, who are evidently the only thing in this goddamned wasteland he can keep under control.

Life outside the Vault is full of shipments to be made and taken; production schedules to be set and adjusted; broken things needing fixing; problems needing solutions; people needing the blessing of their Redeemer. Richard wheedling for more water and claiming “low yield” when Furiosa returns with half-full guzzoline tanks. Kalashnikov and his Howitzer.

But, for the first time in unnumbered days, he is able to let that slip off his shoulders as he steps into his wives’ presence. For the first time in unnumbered days, he has obedient, respectful, thankful wives who know their place and know what a gift it is to be them, to hold his favor. Keen, having swung from one extreme of total rebellion to the other of total obedience, now settles in the middle, just where he wants her. This new equilibrium cools Dag’s growing temper and shrinks Splendid’s tension.

It was Splendid who had pulled Joe’s hand from his Anaconda after Keen had cracked his knee. It was Splendid who had been in front of him to take the blow that was meant for Keen, who, eight months pregnant, had swung her fist at Joe’s unmasked face and bloodied his mouth. It was Splendid, sainted Splendid, who walked daily the dangerous bridge spanning the yawning gulf between Joe’s demands and his other wives’ defiance.

The bridge is shorter now; the gulf less deep. And Keen the Darkling, not Keen the Viper, is usually the first to set foot upon it now.

Keen the Darkling, who is, according to his mental calendar, ovulating.

He steps into the Vault, expecting them to be asleep. It’s late, and he had told Miss Giddy he wouldn’t be back until the next day. But they are awake, perched on the stack of pillows and books by the piano. Dag strums the guitar and Angharad and Keen harmonize a song. The music hits the wall of his presence and drops into silence. Three heads swivel toward him at once.

He wants nothing more than to sit and listen to them sing, but he cannot linger in the Vault tonight. He has too much to do. “Keen. To me.”

The interplay of soft yellow light and shadow over her face and neck and chest holds Joe’s gaze as she moves from under the light toward him in the dimness. On impulse, he brushes the thick pad of his thumb over the scarring between her bonewhite eye and temple. She does not flinch. The smallest flicker of a smile twitches his mouth under the mask.  

Joe’s touch, never welcome, always possessive, is almost tender. His progress up the stairs is even. So are the hissing breaths he draws from the mask. His voice is a rusty rumble; not his usual bark. The smell of steel and ozone and iron is slathered thick on him. _The Bullet Farmer must’ve given Joe what he wanted. Else he didn’t and fighting about it tuckered the old smeg out. Good._ She can bite a little tonight.

Keen takes her time unwinding her hair from the thick braid it’s in, listening to the sounds of Joe’s undressing. She turns her back to him and shakes her hair loose, letting it cascade down her back, letting it tempt him, letting her new set of fangs sink deeper. His eyes, greedy and hungry, then his hands, hot and eager, crawl on her like animals. They pull off her clothes and push her onto her back on the bed. He presses the length of his body on top of hers and inhales a lungful of her. Keen feels no hardness between his legs.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, old man. Give it some time. It’s not as spry as it once was.”

“Keep that forked tongue behind your teeth, viper,” he mumbles, no bite in the words. She allows herself a small smile. If not for the assault of Joe’s presence, this game would almost be fun.

Keen gasps as Joe’s fingers find her clit, then her pussy. They work her with less finesse than she’s used to. _He’s in a hurry. Or exhausted. Or both. If I could only see his face…_

An idea drops into the still pool of her mind. Ripples bloom.

Before she can act, he does. She hisses a breath in through gritted teeth as he rams himself into her, insistent and rough. _In a hurry, then._

It’s a small miracle his dick is obeying him without a shot from the Organic; Joe’s mind is only half on the woman under him. It’s on the trade agreement, the war rig in desperate need of a new engine block, the last guzzoline tank running low.

_All of that’s for naught if you don’t have an heir. Focus or you’ll be revving a flat engine._

They didn’t turn on a light in the upstairs bedroom, so all he can see of Keen is the moonlight tracing a curving line from her left breast up her neck to her chin. She is silent. He thrusts hard and is rewarded by a quiet moan.

“Spry enough for you, my Darkling?” he purrs into her ear.

“Once again, we find ourselves possessing two different definitions of the same word.”

“I thought I told you to keep that tongue in its place.” He punctuates the threat with another violent thrust. She grunts.

“It is in its place. Lashing you.”

Her husky murmur, edged with insolence, spikes the spinning fire in him. He rears up on his knees and yanks her hips to him, plunging himself in to the hilt. He looks down at her, drinks in the moonlit sight of her on her back below him, impaled on him, at his mercy. He grips the tops of her thighs and slams into her, again, again. He is snake-charmer; viper-tamer, god, redeemer, master of her, master of his world.

Joe’s thrusts quicken and the engine of his rusty grunts begins its slow rev to redline. This is a switch that flips in him every time; until he comes and of course, after, nothing else matters except him and his pleasure. He fucks hard and fast, pushing and grunting and gripping and panting, until his orgasm draws a curse and a rusty bray from him.

 _Hippopotamus. Old man, old lungs. You’re no god. You’ll die soon. And I’ll dance on your corpse. Old man, old lungs,_ she chants as he falls forward on his hands, his hot sour breath gusting in her face. He slides out of her and gingerly rises from the bed. His come drips out of her as she listens to the sounds of his dressing: trousers gingerly pulled over popping joints, boots stepped in but not tied, armor tossed over shoulders but not buckled, mask pressed on. Thumping steps toward the stairs. She takes a deep breath.

_I’m probably going to regret this._

“Joe,” she calls softly.

The sound of his name on her lips zaps a bolt of electricity up and down his spine that he doesn’t know if he likes or not. He half-turns, wearing an expression of royal disdain even though he knows she can’t see it. She oils off the bed toward him, chin tucked instead of jutted out; shoulders closed instead of thrown back. Her hand reaches for him hesitantly. _What is she doing?_ Joe’s mind splits into twin impulses, both clamoring for his favor: one, the wary, warning him. _She’s a viper, she’s going to bite, don’t let her touch you._ The other, the curious, coaxing him. _Let her do it. She’s reaching out to you; this is what you’ve wanted. Let her touch you._

_Don’t let her touch you!_

_This is what you’ve wanted!_

_She’ll bite!_

_She won’t. Look at her._

_She’ll BITE!_

He snaps a hand out, catches her wrist. Her fingers are inches from his mask.

“I’m not going to do anything. I just… I don’t know what you look like.”  Her voice is small, soft, meek… Joe draws a deep breath, his resolve cracking. The trade agreement, the war rig, are pitched to the distant horizon of his mind.

_Let her touch you. Let her see what everyone else sees. Let her see the face of her god._

_She’ll bite, you fool, she’ll rip your mask off and slice your bag like she did before she’ll bite she’ll bite SHE’LL BITE_

_She’s naked. She’s rolling over to you, submitting to you, giving you what you want. She’s yours now, completely. Let her. Let her. Let her._

He lets his hand fall from hers. Her fingers curl delicately. The bonewhite moonlight pools in her eyes, turned up to his face, and for once, Joe feels her looking _at_ him instead of through him. She breathes softly through parted lips. Helpless, hesitant, vulnerable, she is beautiful. Her fingers uncurl toward him. They land on his left cheek, just below his eye, and he suppresses a shiver. It has been a long time since one of his wives touched him willingly, gently, caressed him like Keen is doing now. A lifetime ago.

Her fingers flatten on his face and move down over his craggy cheek. The touch is electric. He is acutely aware of each tiny twitch, the heat of her skin. Her fingers pause on the seam between flesh and the steel of his mask. Joe’s heart kicks against his chest. He resists the urge to close his eyes, keeping the warning voice quiet but present, coiled like a viper of his own. Keen reaches her other hand up to explore the mask.

“I won’t rip them out,” she whispers as her hands brush over the ribbed tubes. Her fingers trace the outlines of the teeth of his mask, up the slope from his mouth to his ears. She traces the edge of his hairline with each hand from his ears up to the top of his widow’s peak, then down his forehead, brushing over his thick black eyebrows to his eyes, back down where she started. Keen places her hands flat on each side of his face, and Joe thinks for an instant that she will rise up on her tiptoes to kiss him, but her hands slide down, down his chin, neck, over his armored chest.

Joe’s mechanical breaths come deep and long now, controlled. She’d read of dragons. There was a dragon in him now, growling, twisting, burning. Curled in her hands. At her mercy. She fights the grin off her face.

“Take the mask off?” Her voice is so soft, oh fuk-ushima, so soft. Miraculously, Joe feels his dick stirring again.

“What’s the magic word, my Darkling?”

“Please,” she breathes.

Unable to stop himself even if he’d wanted to, Joe reaches behind his head, snaps the tubes off the air bag, pulls it from his face. He leans forward to place it on the table beside Keen and catches the scent of lavender. Lavender, the flower he planted in the Vault just for them, because he wanted his wives to smell sweet. And how sweet this one is. He straightens, fighting the dragon in him, lighting him on fire, chanting, clamoring for him to take her, take her, now, now, _now_. He fists his hands at his sides.

Keen’s hands find their way back up to his face. Her touch is maddeningly light. Her fingers travel down his jawline, under his chin, over his lips, nose, brushing like butterfly wings over his eyes and the deep crow’s feet at their corners. She traces the thunderous topography of his forehead, deeply lined with years of ill use and hard living. She reaches his temples and runs her hands through his coarse, brittle hair to the ends, smoothing tangles as she goes.

His heart is hammering now; breaths coming in shallow gasps. He drinks in the sight of her big, moon-colored eyes, her soft, upturned face, her delicately parted lips. His dick is at full attention and throbbing with every beat of his heart. He swallows hard. Her hands slip off again.

Joe’s presence burns and strains like a revving engine caught in neutral. The juxtaposition of outward meekness and inner knowledge of her power dizzies her. When his control breaks, it’ll break _hard._ But she is prepared. He can’t hurt her now. _I’ve got you, old man._

“Now I know what you look like,” she breathes, and god help him, there is a tiny, impish smile touching one corner of her lovely mouth. “Uglier than I thought.”

“…Oh, you fuku-damned viper,” he growls, and he swears he hears her giggle as he tackles her down onto the bed.

She is still slippery and ready from their time before. He surges into her with a ragged gasp. She’s driven everything else out of his mind but her, her, her small bouncy tits, the delicious curve of her stomach blending into the jut of her hips, the sweet, slick heat of her pussy taking all of him. All of her is his. After so long. He pushes into her, deeper, deeper, buries his face into the curve of her neck under her chin and sucks heat to the surface, relishing her gasp. “My Keen, my Darkling,” He purrs into her ear, nibbling at the lobe, “you’ll make me such a fine strong son this time. I know it.”

“Only if you make me come again,” she pants.

“Of course, pet. Daddy would never leave you wanting. Daddy loves you.”

“Then prove it, _Daddy.”_ She hisses this last word with teeth bared, wraps her legs around his middle, and bucks her hips upward to meet his own thrust. The jolt of feeling bouncing between his brain and his belly from her thrust nearly does him in. Fuk-ushima, where was this woman a year ago? He pulls out of her, grabs her hips and flips her over. She goes willingly, knowing what’s coming, wanting it, loving it, her ass in the air, her beautiful pussy limned in chrome by the moonlight, dripping for him. He hooks his hands into the silky, curved crease where her legs meet her hips and slides back in, letting out his breath in a husky sigh. He thrusts slowly, deeply, trying to keep his orgasm at bay. He never thought he’d love the sight of muscles on a woman, but the way the muscles of her back move under her sleek, supple skin hypnotizes him. She tosses her inky hair out of her face and he grabs a fistful. The grip of his hand in her hair recalls the first time he’d bred her, when she was beaten and bloody, sore and sour. How far he’d come. How well he’d tamed her. How glad he is that he didn’t cast her out.

Keen’s moans quicken. He knows that when she comes, so will he. Perfect, oh, perfect. She balls her fists into the sheets. He slams into her, pulls all the way out, slams back in again, driving her crazy for him like she drove him crazy for her.

“Yes, my Darkling, come for me, come for Daddy…”

A hoarse squeal rips from her lips and Joe feels her pussy clench around his aching cock. She bucks her hips backward into him, which tips him into an orgasm that punches through him, from his belly to his toes to his head, hollows him out and fills him with power, pure and chrome, and he is a shining god, he is immortal, he is eternal.

He opens his eyes. He is on his hands and knees, Keen under him. She is panting softly, fisted hands relaxed. He bends down and kisses his brand on the back of her neck. His silverwhite hair falls in double curtains along the sides of his head, mixing in the moonlight with her moon-dusted crowblack hair.

“Good girl,” he rumbles. “Good girl, Keen my Darkling.”

She sighs, this one contented, not defeated.


	15. Logistic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keen destroys a book.
> 
> No warnings.

The fear and fury of Keen’s first pregnancy is subdued for her second. Nevertheless, Joe watches her face carefully as the Organic Mechanic mumbles distractedly into her pussy.

“Shine as can be,” he says through a lopsided grin, standing and wiping his hands on a rust-colored rag. “First trimester down, two to go.”

Joe nods, jaw tight. He will keep his own hope subdued as well. Keen’s and Angharad’s miscarriages still flit like satellites across his mind every now and then, pinging regret into his heart. He would not let himself get carried away this time. His proud strong crowhaired heir stands across a foggy gulf of days, waiting for him shrouded in mist.

* * *

 

“Corpus,” she whisper-calls. A creak of springs and leather.

“Keen. How the hell did you get out? Again?”

“I wedged a book in the hinge of the door a few days ago so that it didn’t shut all the way when Joe opened it tonight.” She slips onto the square stone chair beside Corpus’ chair, hand on her belly, just beginning to swell.

Corpus groans. “You killed a book.”

Keen shrugs. “It did me more good that way than on the shelf.”

Corpus’ sigh is long and deep. “What do you want, girl?”

Keen hitches a breath. “I need your help.”

A beat of silence. “You can put that idea out of your pretty little head right now.”

Keen smiles. “Miss Giddy wasn’t exaggerating when she called you the sharpest mind in the Citadel. Besides her.”

“Go back to the Vault, Keen. I can’t help you. Even if I wanted to.”

“You do want to. I hear it in your voice.”

“You hear my stunted vocal cords.”

Corpus breathes like his father. Like the air disobeys him and he must drag it into his lungs. “I know you think you can’t go against Joe, but…Corpus… you have to know what he’s doing to us is wrong.”

In-breath. Out-breath. In. Held. Out. “I’m the eyes of the Citadel. It’s my job to know everything that goes on. If you get out, he’ll know I helped you. He’ll kill me.”

“No he won’t.” She grins. “There’s a flower that grows in the Vault. I don’t think he knows what it is. Miss Giddy calls it valerian. I read—well, Dag read that if you eat valerian it’ll put you to sleep. We can give you valerian--”

“We? Who is we?”

“Angharad, Dag, Miss Giddy, and me.”

“What you’re talking about is madness, girl. It’ll never work. You’ll never get past Dad’s attendants or the Primes.”

“Speaking of them, I’m hoping one of them will help me. That pup that I talked to the last time I was here? He thinks Joe’s letting me out on purpose. If I can convince him, maybe he’ll pass the word to the other attendants and the warboys…”

“They’d never believe a breeder.”

“But they’d believe you.”

“First you ask me to turn a blind eye—pun not intended-- to your futile escape attempts, then you convince me to let you poison me, then you ask me to undercut my father’s explicit orders to his devoted followers. You’re the cleverest one of his wives I’ve ever known. And the stupidest.”

“But I convinced you." It feels strange to smile, after holding a snarl so long on her face.

A laborious sigh.

“Hear me out, Corpus, please. At least do that.”

Corpus grunts. The sound is a higher pitched, less gravelly copy of his father’s.

Keen takes a deep breath. “We’ll be doing a fertility ritual out in the desert. Well, they will. It’ll be sort of a blessing for me. For a healthy baby. It has to be done at midnight under a full moon, completely out of sight of men. That’s why Joe can’t come with us. We’ll have to take a gun, for protection, of course, because we have to go far enough out so that nobody can look at us, and we may run into trouble. The warboys will think we won’t know you’ll be watching us, so they’ll feel secure enough to let us go, knowing you’d throw an alarm if we do try any funny business. But you won’t be watching, because you’ll be blasted on valerian. Which we’ll have slipped into your Mothersmilk. Joe will blame us; not you.”

“How are you going to get out of here? Grow wings?”

“Dunebikes. The warboys will lend us two, at your instruction, passed down from Joe. Only enough guzzoline in them to get us out and back again. Old shabby ones. Easily chased down, if it comes to that, but it won’t, because nobody will know what we’ve done until Joe comes to the Vault again.”

“And how are you going to get more guzzoline?”

“If we have enough in the bikes to get us to Gastown, I know where we can refuel and not get caught.”

“How are you going to get from the Vault to the ground?”

“Attendants will escort us. At your—Joe’s—instruction.”

“How are you going to get out of the Vault?”

“The book.”

“How are all of you going to get out while Dad’s _in_ the Vault with you?”

“Well, there’s a chance he won’t be. Dag and Angharad are both on their cycle.”

“Either way, girl, you couldn’t get out. He’d either be in the Vault with you or the door wouldn’t be open.”

Keen’s voice dies in her throat, drips out as a mew. _Goddess curse me for a fool._ “I…”

“Sorry, Keen.” Corpus says, finality in his voice.

Padding feet behind her. She freezes. Not Joe. Not the warpup. The footfalls are slow. Unsteady. Heavy. A hot, clammy hand on her shoulder. The hand does not grip predatorily; just rests.

“Who--”

“A Milking Mother.” Corpus, his voice hushed.

Pieces snap together in her mind. _Milking Mothers. In the sweet-sour room. Pumping sounds. Sour milk._ She rises and turns to face the Mother, feeling the weight of her hand staying where it had fallen.

“You…heard us.” A clammy, soft hand takes her left hand and places it on a flabby cheek slick with grease and sweat. The Mother is taller than Keen. She feels eyelashes under the pad of her thumb and webs of warm plastic and rubber under her palm. The head nods. Keen’s eyebrows knit. “You can’t speak?”

The head shakes.

“Do you want to come with us? Come away from here?”

After a time, the head shakes.

 _Why? Joe uses you just like he does us. We’re wombs on legs. You’re milkbags on legs. Cows. Animals. All of us._ “Are you here to help?”

The head nods firmly. Keen’s heart skips.

“If I get you some valerian, can you put it into Corpus’ Mothersmilk?”

The head nods.

“Can you… can you open the Vault door for us on the next full moon?”

The head nods. She feels the blubbery flesh pull up in a smile.

“Oh, thank you,” Keen breathes, throat tight and heart aching. With the hand that isn’t on the Mother’s cheek, she grabs the hand that rests on her shoulder and squeezes. “Thank you. Goddess bless you.” The Mother presses her free hand to Keen’s on her cheek, lets both slide heavily off. Keen listens to the receding plod of the Mother’s feet.

Corpus heaves a thick sigh beside her.

“Any more questions, Corpus?” Keen wipes a tear from her eye.

“Just one. Do you understand what will happen if Dad catches you?”

Keen’s face smooths into stone. _I am viper. I am scorpion. I am wasp._ “Yes I do.”

After a long silence, Corpus murmurs: “Valerian tastes like shit, doesn’t it.”

* * *

 

Keen’s heart hammers in her chest. “We need to talk.”

"About what?” Angharad asks. The soft thump of a book closing.

“Something important. Dag? Miss Giddy? Can you come sit?” Keen sits up, making room for the two other women, who pile on the pillows against the sun-warmed window. She swallows around a jagged lump in her throat. Why is this conversation with her sister-wives so much more stressful than the one she had with Joe’s trueborn son?

“What’s wrong, Keen?” Dag.

Keen bites her lip. “We’re getting out. On the next full moon.”

It takes a long time for anyone to draw breath. It takes longer for them to speak.

“You… you’re joking.” Dag.

“No I’m not. I have a plan.”

She does not know that as she talks, each woman’s face cycles through shock, fear, disbelief, awe, doubt, wonder, and through again, like the face of the moon that glides past the window at night. She does hear their breaths hitch and gasp, shudder and sigh. She feels Dag shiver when she tells them about the bikes. Angharad’s hand grasps her shoulder when her words run out.

“Is this real, Keen?”

“Yes.”

The silence roars.

“We can _do_ this,” Keen whispers, her voice strained. “I’ve spoken to Corpus Colossus. To the attendant pup. The Milking Mother. They’ll help us.”

“You _what?_ You _got out?_ How?” Dag.

“I check the door every night. One night Mechanic left and didn’t lock it behind him. That was the first time. I stuck a thin flappy book into the lower hinge so that the door shuts when Joe pulls it, but whatever makes it lock doesn’t engage. Joe hasn’t noticed because there’s no reason to suspect us anymore. We’re all playing nice.”

Angharad coughs a weak laugh. “Now I know where _Animal Farm_ went.”

“We can’t drive those things.” Dag. “We don’t know how and you’re blind.”

“It’s easy. I can show you in two minutes. I can drive one. Miss Giddy, you can drive a dunebike, can’t you?”

“I’m too old, child.”

Keen blows a gentle raspberry. “Joe’s a million days old and drives us just fine.”

Miss Giddy’s cool, paper-dry hands enclose one of hers. “I was a woman grown when Joe was a babe at breast. I wouldn’t last long in the wastes, dearie.”

“Oh, Miss Giddy,” Angharad sighs.

Keen’s throat tightens. “Are you sure? He’ll kill you.”

“I’m prepared for what may come.” She squeezes Keen’s hand.

“No, I won’t leave you, Miss Giddy.” Dag, sobbing, reaching over, clinging to her.

Keen swallows the sob in her own throat. “Dag, we have to leave. This is our only chance. We can do this. You ride with me. Angharad can drive the other d--”

“Even if you showed me how to turn it on, Keen, I wouldn’t be able to just rev and go. We wouldn’t make it far enough. He’d come after us and kill us.”

Dismay blooms in Keen. “No. If we leave an hour before midnight, we can get at least a hundred miles away, even if we go slow…”

“What’s a hundred miles to the Gigahorse? The back tires are taller than I am. He’d chase us down in half a day. Less,” Angharad says, her voice shaky. 

“Angharad, you can _do this._ You have to.”

“I don’t. But you do.”

“You’re coming with me,” Keen sobs hoarsely, dismay deepening to dread. “You and Dag. If I have to carry you both on one bike, I’ll do it.”

“Then you may as well have me driving. That much weight on one old dunebike…”

Keen’s face screws down into a grimace of anguish. _Goddess curse me. Curse them. If I’d told them earlier, given them more time to prepare…_

“You can make it out if you go alone. You’ve done this before; I can tell. You go. This isn’t our time, but we’ll get out of here. Soon.” Keen hears regret crack her voice.

“Angharad…” Keen feels Angharad’s soft hands on her cheeks. Their foreheads touch. Joe’s favored wife whispers the words, but they hit like blows.

“ _We are not things_.”

Keen throws her arms around Angharad’s shoulders and yanks her into a desperate, ferocious hug. Angharad returns the embrace, one hand cupping the back of Keen’s head. Dag’s arms around them both. Miss Giddy too. They remain that way for a long time.

The next four days are silent and solemn. Dag and Angharad are both on their blood, so Joe only comes to the Vault once, to fuck Keen and then and fall asleep with his meaty, calloused hand on her growing belly. Though the women speak little, they drink in more of each other’s presence than perhaps they ever had. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you by my roommate, whose dogged and tireless refusal to have anything whatsoever to do with Mad Max continues to feed the flames of my fandom. Love ya, nerd.
> 
> Before anyone gets all kerfuffled about why Angharad and Dag stay in the Vault, I wrote this story to dovetail back into the canon storyline of MMFR. So they'll get out. Just not now. :)


	16. The Smell of the Desert

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keen does the thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No warnings. 
> 
> I'm so sorry this chapter is a day late!

Miss Giddy places a lumpy leather bundle in Keen’s arms. “I hope it’s not too heavy, dearie. You need to carry lots of water.”

Keen jostles it up and down; smiles. “Not at all.”  She feels for the strap, which is made of a piece of cloth she knows well.

“Miss Giddy, your shawl…”

 “We had to make you a bag to carry. This was my contribution. The carrying part is one of Joe’s old breather bags. That’s his contribution.” Keen hears the bitter smile in Miss Giddy’s voice.

“I put our last tomato in there. It’s in a box so it doesn’t get squished. I lined the box with the first half of _The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe_. The other half I used to wrap a bottle of Mothersmilk.” Angharad. “We saved as many seed cakes as we could. If you don’t scarf them down like you normally do, they should last you at least thirty days.”

“And I put in a few dried lizards.” Dag. “If they ask to see what’s inside, you can tell them the lizards are for the ritual. But you can also eat them if you get hungry.”

“There’s some apples and oranges in there too. Nice and juicy. Help you save water.” Miss Giddy.

Keen loops the strap of the bag over her shoulder and across her chest and opens her arms. Angharad and Dag fall into them. Their tight grip rushes over her in a wave of soft, warm skin perfumed with jasmine, and she aches for them. Aches for missing them, aches for the things they will have to endure. Aches that she will not be there to endure them too.

She turns from them. They’ve had their tears. The attendants that will escort her and the warboys that will be watching her can’t see tears. There is a small suck of air as the Vault door opens. She scents the air, smells the faint sourness of sweat and milk. She steps out. _Goodbye Angharad, Dag, Miss Giddy. Goddess above, watch over them until I get back._

The Mother’s hand on her shoulder.

“Did you give Corpus the valerian?”

The hand pats once.

“Thank you. Thank you. I… don’t know what else to say.”

The hand squeezes, then pushes Keen down the hall.

Keen throws her head back, her arms wide, and lets the cool mist in the hydroponic gardens bless her one last time. She knows she must not linger. She reaches out and grabs a fistful of leaves. A small fruit, belled at the bottom and pointed at the top, comes away in her hand. A fig. She reaches back, unties the leather strings holding her bag together, and nestles it into her bag as she crosses through the milking room into the throne room.

“Where is the Immortan? I thought he was going to see you off.” The warpup asks. A tiny slurping noise to her right. Corpus and his Mothersmilk. 

Keen recites her line. “He decided that letting all three of us go at the same time would be too great a risk. He will send each of us alone. He is tending to my sisters.”

“Follow me,” the pup says. She hears two other sets of booted feet fall in beside her. Attendants.

She thinks of the smell of the desert, the bite of the wind as the warpup guides her silently through anthill corridors echoing with the sound of breathing and boots, down, down, down. There is a rush of salty air and the yawning expanse of the desert explodes in front her, swelling her heart and pouring into her lungs. There is sand beneath her bare feet, the top layer already cooled from the chilly night wind.

"Your bike," one of the attendants says as they step up on a cool steel platform. She treads carefully to avoid tripping over the rivets and bars. She thinks of the freedom she has not tasted in five thousand days as she reaches out and touches the peeled and pebbled grip of the dunebike’s handlebar. Hundreds of pairs of eyes weigh like boulders on the back of her neck as she checks the saddlebags, feels the smooth wooden grip of an old revolver. She flicks the cylinder open. The pad of her finger finds only one bullet. She does not dare check to see if there is another bike and another gun. One bullet will have to do. She tucks the revolver into the makeshift holster she made from a spare piece of cloth wrapped around her waist. She thinks of the faces of her sisters, the ones she touched for the last time minutes ago and the one she hasn’t touched in forever and forever as she mounts the bike and adjusts the pack on her back. 

The dunebike roars to life in the quiet of night with a shattering ferocity that nearly unmakes her. She sits rigidly, heart hammering, waiting for the storm of a thousand battle cries to descend upon her and swallow her up, but ten, twenty breaths go by and the throaty idle of the bike settles into the tapestry of the desert night.

_Go, go now._

The vibrations of the bike mark her path clearly. She lets off the brake, puttering the bike along with a foot dangling. Up a gear. The bike's transmission is slurry, but the wind is with her.

She is clear of the Citadel’s aural shadow, but she keeps the bike in second gear. Warboys are still watching.

Up a gear. Her heart chatters in time to the strokes of the engine. Time stretches to infinity. How long has she been puttering along? Five minutes? Fifty? She turns her head back; nothing of the Citadel exists in her senses now.

_Go, go NOW._

She twists the throttle all the way down and the bike leaps forward. The rev of the engine is the sweetest music she’s ever heard. Her hand and foot tap through the last two gears with familiar, practiced speed. The desert wind whips the tears from her cheek. Her spirit leaps up from her and soars into the moon-frosted night.

_I am viper. I am scorpion. I am wasp. I am free. I am free I am free I am free I AM FREEEEE_

* * *

Her stop in Gastown is short and smooth. She kills the bike’s engine as soon as she detects the refinery towers and jogs the rest of the way, the weight of the baby heavy in her. Everything is as she remembers. She takes a carrytank from the rows and rows of them in the vehicle bay she knows the best, close to her old cave, and fills it from the hi-octane valve. Running back with a forty-pound carrytank of guzzoline is out of the question, so she walks as fast as she can, the turning of time tugging at her and the tank burning up the muscles in her arms. The bike’s nearly-empty tank drinks all the guzzoline she brought.

She turns east now, feeling the direction by the pull of the wind and the growing warmth of the sunrise. To her ears, the shifting, liquidy sand is a formless void, but the knuckles of rock punching up from beneath the dunes guide her.

The wind carries a distant but unmistakable noise to her: engines. From the west. A burst of panic seizes her heart. _I fanged it too early and they saw. I took too long at Gastown. Goddess curse me, I left the carrytank in the middle of the road!_

She fangs it now, hard, and grits her teeth against the shrinking of her perception as the bike catches up to its own sound waves.


	17. Gone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keen has one bullet. 
> 
> Warnings for implied violence/implied character death.

A thousand furies run baying like rabid dogs through Joe’s mind. The desert is a formless void, a tunnel he barrels through, and at the end is Keen. Keen the Darkling, Keen the Viper, Keen the Betrayer, who dares to defy her god. Keen the Feral. Keen the Thief, who dares to slink out from under him with his child. His property. The Gigahorse’s engine roars and its tires swallow miles. Imperator Boneshake and his two Prime Imperators struggle to keep up on their own dunebikes.

Joe’s eyes had only just cracked open when a Prime had knocked on his bedroom door. “It’s been three hours. Your wife hasn’t returned from her ritual yet,” he’d said through the steel, and the strange assembly of words had not entirely registered the first time.

Then the Citadel had roared to life in the predawn gloom.

“There she is!” Boneshake, riding a ridge of rock to Joe’s right, points to their ten o’clock. She is a fleck of dark on the vast expanse of undulating red. Off road, fanging hard east toward the mountains. As soon as the juts of rock hemming him in flattens, he yanks the Gigahorse off the road toward the speck of moving black, a spray of sand bursting up in front the Gigahorse’s nose as he barrels through a dune. Boneshake and his Prime Imperators flank him.

“When we get close, pin her against the rocks. Do _not_ hurt my child!” He bellows to the three men riding beside him. He would not chase her down just to have to mangle her and the bike just to catch her. He’d had a very groggy Corpus signal for reinforcements from Gastown, hoping he’d get some of the People Eater’s Polecats. But since he found out Joe had stolen his prize dinner, the goddamned fatass had been especially uncooperative, withholding guzzoline, nitro, and now, aid.

Perhaps for the better. Polecats in Joe’s hands would make easy work of the capture. Polecats with Eater’s orders to bring her back to Gastown would yank her right out from under him, and all-out war with the People Eater is not something Joe wants to contemplate. Three dunebikes and the Gigahorse are enough to run her down, outmaneuver her, flank her, _grab her._

_Goddess curse me for a fool, curse me for taking this piece of shit bike._

The roar and rattle of engines gains, close enough now for her to pick out three dunebikes like hers and a thundering bellow that has to be the Gigahorse. She has the throttle twisted all the way down. The engine of the old bike whines grittily, resenting the abuse. She tightens her grip on the handlebars.Three dunebikes to outmaneuver her. The Gigahorse to take her.

 _No. Nobody is ever going to take me again._ She grips the form of the pistol through the fabric pressing it against Joe’s child.

A rev of engine behind her, close. Two more to her right. In front of her to her left, a ridge of rock, several feet high and about two hundred feet long, juts up from the sand like the curling crest of a wave. They would try to pin her against it.

 _Nice try, old man._ Keen slows a fraction and lets them push her toward the rock. They do not know that her mother took her on dunebikes before she could walk. They do not know that Rock Riders stole her as a child and she was a part of their tribe for twelve hundred days. They do not know that the dunebike the warboys gave her is an older copy of one she knows intimately. The rock wall looms close in her perception. She approaches it in a bend to the left, aligns the nose of her bike…

Victory splits Joe’s face in a grin to match the mask as he watches Boneshake and his Prime Imperators form into a claw around Keen. They’re riding her close, curving her toward the rock wall. She’s got the bike pointed straight at it. She has no choice but to stop…

And doesn’t. Joe’s eyebrows shoot up as she sails the bike up the rock wall, rides the wavelike curve of it and drops the bike back down to the sand, pointed straight at him, without the smallest fishtail. A Prime Imperator veers sharply and follows her, but Boneshake and the other Prime are dumped from their bikes as they pull up hard to avoid crashing into the rock.

Keen zips past the Gigahorse, white eyes flashing and black hair streaming. He whips the wheel around, pulling the Gigahorse up on two tires, fury clanging in his head. “ _Get her! Run her down!”_ He roars to the two men scrambling back on their bikes, to the Prime now far out ahead of him, hard on Keen’s heels.

_How do I shake them? How do I shake them? How do I shake them?_

Keen casts about her perception, looking for rocks, dunes, anything. She could outmaneuver the gargantuan Gigahorse easily, but the three dunebikes, in better shape than hers, won’t be outdone that quickly. The mountains are still far to the east; they would catch up to her long before she could make it safely into the labyrinthine canyons.

Panic snaps a few bars of the mental cage around it.

One bullet.

_How do I shake them how do I shake them how do I shake them one bullet who is it for who is it for_

She would not shoot at Joe unless the shot was sure; there was a big difference between throwing an apple in a windless room and shooting from a moving bike. She'd never been as good with a gun as she'd been with knives and the thunderballs the Rock Riders had shown her how to make. 

There is another massive knuckle of rock far ahead of her, and only one dunebike in close pursuit of her. The other three vehicles are behind her, at the very edge of her perception but gaining fast. If she could run this one into that unbankable wall of rock…

The dunebike in pursuit levels with her, despite the wide open throttle on hers. The rider veers it towards her, trying to cut her off or unbalance her. She feels burning metal brush her leg as she seizes the brake as hard as she dares. The sound of the pursuing engine and a bark of dismay shoots ahead of her. She veers right, looping wide around the rock. The other two bikes and the Gigahorse are closer now.

Joe’s iron grip on the Gigahorse’s wheel turns his powdered knuckles even whiter, starts a thrum in the muscles of his arms and shoulders. She’s trying to cut the Prime off, pin him against the rock and wreck him. The other two bikes zoom ahead of the Gigahorse to help the Prime. Keen’s bike is older and in worse repair, but she rides it like she’s known it her whole life. His Prime is a good rider on a better bike, but the dunebike isn’t the vehicle he knows the best. Joe should have posted guards at the Vault door. He should have broken her more thoroughly. He should have blown her brains out and left her back at the People Eater’s gate. He should have _known._ He should have _seen_ what she was. _Feral. Viper. Filthy goddamned betraying cunt._ Immortan Joe pounds his fist on the dashboard of the Gigahorse in impotent rage.

Keen swerves close to the other dunebike rider, the echo of the rock wall on the other side of him boomingly close. He brakes, swerves behind her to her other side, pinning her now. If his orders were just to stop her, he would have already; he’d have mashed her into the wall, run her over with his speedier bike, T-boned her and sent her flying. But Joe, god to his people and slave to his fears, would not risk harm to the child in Keen’s womb.

An idea slams into her like a locomotive.

_One bullet._

Keen squeezes her useless eyes shut. _Goddess bless me and keep me. If I lay me down to die, take me on to that blue sky._ She yanks the handlebars around, narrowly avoiding a collision with the rider beside her, braking into a sand-spraying fishtail to face the two other bikes and the Gigahorse roaring up behind her.

Joe jams his foot on the brakes, yawing the Gigahorse violently to the side, as his Imperators surround her and she steps off her bike. He leaps out of the Gigahorse and barrels toward her. _Viper, betrayer, thief, you’re mine!_

He doesn’t see the gun in her hand until she jabs its muzzle into her belly. His heart slams to a stop and his feet send up spurts of sand as they skid.

“ _Drop the gun_ ,” he roars. “ _Do not kill my child!”_

“Let me go or I’ll pull this trigger!” she screeches.

He tears breath from his respirator, but there is no air in the air he’s breathing. The universe shrinks down to a dim redness around the sight of his wife, face screwed down in rage and terror, finger beckoning the bullet that would send both her and his son to hell. Dread blasts the strength from his body, turns him mortal, renders him helpless _._

“I told you at the start, old man; I am anything but yours! _Let me go!_ ” Her tortured shriek slashes his ears. The wind skirls strands of Keen’s crowblack hair across her face, obscuring first one milkwhite eye, then the other, now her bared teeth. Her gauzy white robes, already tinted yellow by the desert’s unrelenting grasp, stand out like whipping flags among the chrome and steel and leather and oil-blackened canvas around her.

“If you let me go, I’ll bring it back,” she says, her voice cracking with desperation. “If it’s a healthy boy, I’ll bring it back. I swear. Just let me go. You have my word.”

The ice of dread shriveling his heart shivers apart, to heat up, to drip down into his core and spin, spin, collecting more and more of him, burning as it spins faster. Her word. _Her word._ The lying viper, who sang to him, caressed him, fucked him, _made him believe she was his_ , who just betrayed him, is giving him her word? “Your _word,_ ” he bellows, “means nothing to me, you treacherous _snake_!”

“What’s more important to you, old man? Your pride intact or your child alive?” The sound of the hammer cocking back is deafening, even over the oscillating roar of four nitro-boosted engines.

Suddenly his mind goes quiet. In the eye of the storm, the cool, slow drawl of a man long dead surfaces. He hasn’t heard Deepdog’s voice in forty years. _Let her go. She’s rabid for freedom. Look how steady her hand is. She’d rather pump her ownself full of lead than go back with you. You don’t need that. You have two other willing wives and you can get more. Let her go._

He will not let his son go. Cannot let his crowhaired son go. He will keep Keen until she gives birth, then destroy her.

_If you do that, you’ll make her desperate. She’ll find a way to kill the baby or both of them. It’s happened before; remember Furiosa’s mother? She’s telling the truth, Moore; she doesn’t want the kid. She’ll bring it back and you can do whatever you want to her then._

No. He will kill her now. He is Immortan Joe, He Who Grabs the Sun, and he will not let his property betray him and live to tell it. He yanks his Anaconda from its holster on his codpiece and levels it at Keen’s head.

_Is that supposed to scare her, Moore? Look how she’s got her own gun pointed. It’d go right through the baby and hit her spine. Kill them both before you can get her to the Organic. What’s that old saw? If you love something let it go and it’ll come back to you?_

Immortan Joe’s low, lethal growl thunders in his chest, and for a moment, he _is_ the hungry engine of the Gigahorse, ready to charge and rip her apart.

He’ll set a watch. He’ll have Corpus’ eyes sewn to the telescope; he’ll have warboys patrolling night and day; he will send out a call to all the bounty hunters in the Wasteland for her. And when he catches her he will kill her inch by keening inch, in front of Dag and Angharad so they understand what it means to call down the wrath of a god. He jams the Anaconda back in its holster. The word, ugly and bitter, burns his throat. “Go.”

“Immortan…?” Boneshake questions at his side.

“ _GO!”_

Keen stumbles back at the ferocity of his bellow, nearly tripping over her bike. With the gun still pressed into her belly hard enough to dimple it, she clambers clumsily back on the bike. In a scream of engine and an arcing spray of sand, she is gone.

There is an invisible rope. One end is tied around Keen’s belly. The other end is tied to all the fury in Joe. As his feral wife speeds away, the rope pulls it out of him like taffy, emptying him. The rope reaches the end of its length, snaps.

Immortan Joe’s heart cracks in his chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS IS NOT THE END OF THE STORY!!! There is one more chapter to go! Thank y'all so much for reading!


	18. Westward

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the last chapter! It's set about 6-8 months after "Gone". No warnings.

“This is crazy. You’re going to get both of you killed."

She continues to pack what little she has into her old bag, ignoring Fiver’s quiet words. The rest of the camp is asleep, save for the bounty hunter watching them, clicking the hammer back and pulling the trigger of his unloaded rifle, over and over. _Very intimidating,_ she’d told him one night. _There are these small metal things called bullets, probably about the size of your schlanger. If you put them in one end, they come out the other end very fast. Try that._

But he wouldn’t, and they both know it. Joe wants her alive and unspoiled, and the bounty hunter will not attempt any attack with Fiver close.

The fire gently warming her left side dims and dies. She loops her bag over her left shoulder, then her rifle. Adjusts the baby’s sling on her right shoulder and the patchy, worn leather jacket and ratty, overmended shirt under it. Checks the pistol in the holster strapped to her thigh. Then her pockets. Knives, thunderballs, bullets, an extra diaper cloth for the baby.

Fiver’s stealthy sniper’s feet whisper in the sand behind her as she plods through the sand to her bike.  The night wind is against her. It teases strands of her crowdark hair out of the bun at the base of her skull.

“I don’t understand. You owe that smeg fuckall. All he did to you and you’re going to keep your word to him?”

She throws a leg over the bike, kicks the stand up. The baby grunts and whines. She pats the tiny warm back. A hand on hers on the throttle.

“Don’t do this.” Fiver’s voice is low and tight.

She sighs. “I’m not doing it for him, Fiver. The history man that came through a few days ago said my sister is alive. At the Citadel.” Bitterness scours her mind like desert sand. “The whole time. And I never knew.”

“How could you? You were kept in that room all the time.”

“I’m going back to find my sister and get all of them out. I’ve got a plan.”

The hand slips off hers. “You’re going back to die.”

“Maybe so. But Swaddledogs don’t die easy.”

In a scream of engine and an arcing spray of sand, she is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know the ending is ambigious; I meant it that way! I won't answer any of your questions about what happens to Keen; it's up to you to fill in those blanks. :3
> 
> I want to thank you all for reading this story and giving me such wonderful feedback and compliments! I didn't really think this story would get the attention it's gotten, and I'm grateful. Thank you and stay tuned; even though Keen's "canon" story is over, I'll most likely still post about her here. I also RP her on Tumblr at @keenthedarkling, so if you want to read more about her or if you RP in the MMFR verse and are interested (or want to see the continuation of her story), feel 10000% free to drop me a line. Be warned; the content there is 18+ and all the warnings in this story and more apply there.


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